WEB APOCALYPSE: Is the Internet Crashing Across America?

Is the Internet Crashing Across America?

Don't break out your shotgun, gas mask, and emergency rations, but make sure you know where they are: it looks like an enormous chunk of the Internet in North America is dead.

According to the Internet Traffic Report, which "monitors the flow of data around the world," we're in the midst of some kind of web apocalypse, with major network hubs across the continent completely dead—33% of all packets, the little bites of data that comprise all action on the Internet, are getting lost in transmission. This is also, perhaps not coincidentally, the same day Tumblr, Google, and Dropbox have all either gone down or reported outages, as The Next Web points out.

And update to the item above says:

Update: ICANN's Joe Abley says the sky is not falling: "Your note was the first I'd heard of anything. [Major networking conference] Nanog is silent, which seems unusual if anything really was happening." Or maybe the Internet is dying because everyone important is at a major networking conference!

Update 2: Internet overseer ARIN also reports all quiet on the web-stern front:

As far as ARIN can tell, the traffic levels to our public facing services (including DNS and Whois services) appear normal.

But then there is this report:

Entire North American internet suddenly slowed down today at 5:30am

The Internet Traffic Report is showing that packet loss – which is (I’m paraphrasing here) data sent over the the internet that fails to reach its intended destination – has sharply increased since early this morning, from a usual loss of yesterday’s 24% to around 36% as of 2pm today, EST. A general rule of thumb is that the higher the packet loss, the slower the internet. Here’s the graph of packet loss over the last 24 hours:

Some major servers in New York City, Mexico, California, and Wisconsin are not responding at all. This is a graph of traffic data from the last 24 hours. As you can see, there’s a dramatic drop in data at around 5:30am this morning.

See also:

A Tough Week for the Internet as Major Sites Experience Outages

Last week it was YouTube for a few minutes, but this week it was more than just the streaming video service that wasn't available to Internet users.

Earlier this week, Amazon's Web Services went down causing sites that rely on Amazon's servers to go down too. Popular sites like Reddit, Pinterest, and Foursquare all experienced outages as a result. The outage lasted for a few hours on Tuesday, and naturally many took to Twitter to complain about the fact that people couldn't get to their services. (By the way, Twitter itself experienced its fair share of outages .)

Today a separate outage occurred. Google's App Engine, which powers other sites, along with Dropbox and Tumblr experienced outages. The outage lasted close to two hours for many of the services.

Ok, this may be nothing, but......

I've been having some sporadic problems today with sites that suddenly won't load. I had assumed it was my wireless. Maybe not.

Ohhh no......wont be able to check Facebook...... doom n gloom...

You know....with this story....the Bengazi scandal...and Frankenstorm Sandy.... Kinda feels like a lot of important stuff is happening lately.

LOL its hackers ddosing amazon and google web services. Some have been taking pops at cloud services and web hosting facilities.

Don't know why and they are getting slated for it. It does appear to be originating from out with the US though so who knows what these guys are up to.

Around 8:30 this morning (west coast) I was getting a very strange error code when trying to log onto MSN homepage. At first it seemed like my wireless, but everything else was working. Lasted for a couple of hours.

I experienced strange internet outages yesterday too. But today has been relatively normal.

I just thought it was my end.

Maybe they're testing the kill switch?

Is this only the US or has there been reports of other places?

If this is true, it's super strange.

Oh well, now we get to play outside

I was having problems a week ago . My wifi keeps disconnecting . It's not reconnecting automatically when it comes back. I have to keep typing my password to join. It never did that before, started yesterday. It usually saves the password. I think that could be an issue with my device though.

Clearly its Iran hacking us

reply to post by loam


Sorry, haven't noticed a problem. Actually my net has been working smoother than normal at peak times.

I live in New Zealand and I have been getting lots of US web pages not loading for two days , I keep refreshing and after about five minutes they load .
Is this a result of that super internet tracking place ( cant remember the name of it ) going live ?

reply to post by Heliophant


Same here, I thought it was my ISP. Specifically I've been having nothing but issues with Google services.. go to google something and it refuses to load results, hanging up getting a connection to their server.

It actually got SO bad .. at one point.. I used Bing ***throws up and cries in the corner***

Well this is interesting because yesterday I was trying to download an Ubuntu ISO and my speed wouldnt go higher than 200 KB/s, Im in Canada, Toronto area. I just assumed it was my wifi was acting up.

But there was a couple sites I access frequently that went down for a few minutes aswell.

This is fascinating!

I've seen my own ISP deal with a packet loss issue lasting several days before, it had me looking to move suppliers, it was impossible to access many sites.

But I've never seen it affecting such a significant region before.

Incidentally, it seems that this hit Europe too, not just the US.

Europe Data

The way I see it, this could be one of several things...

1. An infrastructure problem could be the cause. As with my own ISP, it could just be that something went down and needed to be replaced. Considering how so many companies are owned by, and use the systems of, a larger corporation, it could just be that a major global provider had a technical issue that affected all their sub companies. I think this is the most plausible explanation, especially considering it seems to have hit both the US and Europe - major business and trading partners with interconnected systems more closely tied than with Asia, Australia etc...

2. It could be the testing of a kill switch, something we know several governments have been working on, from the US to Europe. I think this is less likely. There would be easier ways to do it, with certainty, and would not require a significant test like this.

3. It could be the first instance of a major cyber war, with an enemy attempting to test their own kill switch. While implausible and unlikely, it seems odd that this incident would happen now. The timing is strange, with the US being affected in the early morning hours of a Saturday, when presumably fewer people would notice. One would have thought that such a problem - if it were natural, or a failure - would happen at a peak time when the load on systems would be significantly higher.

From a little searching, it does seem that security specialists in cyber crime and threats are watching this data too.

Cyber Threat Monitoring

It's fascinating stuff. I'm keeping an eye on this one!

Originally posted by DariusHames
Is this only the US or has there been reports of other places?

If this is true, it's super strange.

Oh well, now we get to play outside

LOL
That is kind of my thought. If the internet suddenly drops for a little while I might actually get some things done around the house/outside. I wonder how much this storm on the east coast is going to effect internet connections across the US.

But I will say I have been having internet problems for a few weeks if not longer. I think it is my modem, but maybe not.....hard to say.

There was a kill switch of sorts built into old versions of tcp/ip v4 that allowed military traffic to set a certain bit and they would have the right to go before everyone elses data but that seems to have been reused for other stuff probably since the military have their own networks for anything important so the public internet is just for browsing facebook as far as the military is concerned

but more than likely theres a piece of kit at a tier 1 isp thats faulty but unfortunately won't die properly so the backup systems can take over and with these sorts of companies cost cutting by getting rid of the techies who know how it all works and those left don't have the time/willpower to do the necessary problem solving

reply to post by loam


This is weird..two days ago at in the evening this happened here..NOTHING would load. It started with pinterest..pinterest is always glitchy so I thought it was that..then my husband said his sites wouldn't load either and the interest all of sudden got really slow..we checked several other sites and none would load or they would load super slow! ATS didn't load either..FB, Amazon, Etsy..all the normal places I visit on occasion..down. We thought it was just us too

Typical business plan. Skip on infrastructure maintenance to preserve the money that is being made. Surely the move to wireless means that equipment not part of that plan will be allowed to fail apart.

The connections I use are always bad so it's just another day out here.