In a massive internet outage, several popular websites including leading news portals on Tuesday faced outages globally, including Reddit, Spotify, Twitch, GitHub, Hulu, HBO Max, CNN, the Guardian, the NY Times, BBC, Financial Times, and more.
In a massive internet outage on Tuesday, several popular websites including leading news portals faced outages globally. One of the most notable was Reddit, which has over 100 million users worldwide. Reddit is just one of many sites that went down today in an international internet blackout, but it’s a good indication as to how much this type of issue can affect people around the globe with some relying on entertainment or even work-related services that rely on these sites for communication or information services such as email and social media networking.
The popular websites mentioned are experiencing an outage while the network experienced heavy traffic. The article explores the cause of these outages and what you can do to prevent them in the future.
Some of the outages have to do with internet traffic and web server overload issues. According to the New York Times, the outage that took down Reddit affected a large portion of the internet backbone in Northern Virginia near Dulles. The cause of this issue was an optical fiber cable severed inside a manhole, which caused a lot of problems for the network services in that area.
Another reason for outages could be due to configuration or security issues on their end. A configuration issue can be problematic because it doesn’t require you to be malicious or have bad intentions but merely misconfigure things on your end, whether it’s through changing firewall rules or accidentally blocking traffic with malicious intent. In a situation where configuration errors are being made, such as misconfiguring firewall rules, it’s possible that these changes can be made by accident or they could also be intentional.
They could intentionally block your services to provide better service for their own sites. It’s a mistake that many people tend to make when setting up firewalls and blocking traffic isn’t uncommon one bit even if you aren’t malicious. If you do end up blocking traffic, it’s important to verify the configuration on your end to make sure that no one is blocking or filtering specific requests and use mechanisms in place like SSL inspection to inspect traffic so you know what’s going through your network without having to constantly monitor it.
Some of the outages have to do with hackers breaking into the configurations and changing them to their liking. While it’s more likely that a configuration problem would be caused by an accident than a malicious attack, you still have to take into account that someone could cause an outage intentionally if they wanted to.
If somebody were able to gain access to your network, they could do some damage or even shut down your services for good if they wanted. For this type of attack to be successful, you must have poor security on your end that allows these individuals access in the first place.