alt Hacker NewsI see multiple posts here speculating on cyberattack—as opposed to "we pushed a bad configuration update which messed everything up irreparably"—you know, like it has been every other time before this.
E.g., Cloudflare, Meta (who in doing so also locked themselves out of the building), and didn't some bumbling major Canadian telco knock themselves offline for like a week not too long ago?
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That's not true though, sometimes it's inexplicitly DNS too.
I worked at a major ISP and we had a similar situation where the North East went down and the RC was a fiber cut at a major node in Philly.
These network topologies are incredibly complex and edges you think wouldn't exist have ways of suddenly appearing when things go awry.
Yeah, the Canadian telco was Rogers. Total recovery took multiple days. From the Wikipedia writeup:
> In a letter to the CRTC, Rogers stated that the deletion of a routing filter on its distribution routers caused all possible routes to the internet to pass through the routers, exceeding the capacity of the routers on its core network.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Rogers_Communications_out...
The major Canadian outage was Rogers in 2022: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Rogers_Communications_out...
I took my kids swimming that day and the pool couldn't take our money since the payment terminal was on the Rogers cellular network, so it was a free family swim.
Cyberattacks are a good scapegoat for any large incompetent non-tech company that is unable to admit a mistake. (tech companies are more open to admitting actual mistakes - and reluctant to disclose cyberattacks even if there actually was one - where as non-tech ones would rather allude to an attack than admit a mistake)
Cyberattack scenarios pretty much never make sense in case of complete outages; if you have the access required to cause such an outage it’s always more profitable to keep this access and use it for covert spying/targeted attacks or save it for later than to burn it by causing a massive, visible problem.
In a dead empire, sufficiently advanced rot is indistinguishable from malice.
Verizon had issues routing calls to a provider I'm aware of yesterday, and had to make some sort of change today to fix it. I'm definitely thinking bad configuration update.
It's affecting every mobile carrier (ATT, TMO), not just Verizon
One of these times they will be right and you will never hear the end of the time they were first to recognize the start of a cyberattack.