I love Cloudflare’s writeups and Cloudflare in general, and while this was again well written and excellent analysis, it contained a tad bit too much speculation for my taste.
I liked the speculation in this piece. It was well marked as such and just seemed to be "here are the umpteen possibilities that come to mind" from an expert perspective. I don't know enough about backbone networking to speculate like that myself, so it was really interesting to me to get that perspective on the problem solving process for a company like Cloudflare.
It has to be speculation, a lot of cloudflare's customers were affected by this incident and yet there is very little information from level 3 about it. It's good faith speculation and cloudflare mention they've had a similar experience with the same protocols
I think thats because they don't know anything more atm. CenturyLink didn't do a postmortem yet so they can only guess and see what happend. What they suggest all seems possible, but it will be guesswork until CenturyLink explains what happens (if that ever happens)
This is probably as good as it gets for outside analysis. I doubt we will learn much more until CL/L3 posts their own post-mortem with all the data.
Didn’t say it wasn’t good— it was that. I just think it was slightly on the inappropriate side in terms of vendor relationships. I mean obviously CF was kind of making a point to CTL with the article, I get that too.
yes, it's easy to see they are at least somewhat frustrated because of not getting more details about what happened from CenturyLink. I think that's understandable.