Is there a wider internet outage today? | Hacker News Reader

Is there a wider internet outage today?

thousandeyes.com

115 pointsbrucethemoose285 comments

I know HN is getting hugged right now, but many other websites on mobile and landline internet (in the southern US) are chugging for me.

A conspicuous number of services are showing outages on downdetector and thousandeyes.

Is HN struggling so much due to the Apple event or is there another explanation?

no, something is going on across all the sites I visit

It could be both? A wider outage at a high traffic time.

HN is timing out constantly for me. So are some Microsoft services. But then some other websites are loading fine...

HN timeouts only applied while logged in with me

Correct - logged out pages are cached and should serve much faster.

NB, someone was commenting a week ago that HN was observed as faster when logged in, not out:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36117794>

Like any typical developer, my response is "that shouldn't be happening".

If it is happening, that would be most interesting - but we'd need to test to be sure.

Yeah, that's my sense as well.

Speculation was that it might have been anti-bot countermeasures.

I've ... encountered those a few times recently doing my HN front-page research. Though not presenting as latency.

That would imply a slowness on the server and not with general internet peering

Correct.

> "is there another explanation?"

It's aliens. They literally announced they have been reverse engineering space ships from aliens from outer space. I mean I don't think it's true but it's what they announced.

After I read your comment, I googled.

No one official announced anything. Instead an "insider" claims this. Among the claims, is that aliens are working with governements, and provided key tech, such as fiber optics, and silicon chips.

Yeah. OK.

I can literay, over a century, trace all the key scientific discoveries, how they happened, for transistors, ICs, etc. There was no help.

And shining light through glass isn't that fancy of a tech.

These articles piss me off. They belittle the capabilities of humans, for profit.

The parent is a troll and posted this thread "Is Hacker News slow for you guys too? I think it's the Apple announcements" just 20 minutes earlier.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36203460

I'm not a troll I think both reasons are true.

I really wish the aliens would hurry up and give us fusion power already, and maybe the cure to all diseases, a theory of everything and quantum computing while they're at it. I didn't need compact discs that badly.

This is where HN devolves into Reddit joke threads

I have serious routing/peering issues all day long from germany (vodafone).

Dyndns is struggling also for me the entire day.

I haven't dug into the logs but I assume it's the Apple announcement.

Major perf improvements are coming (fingers crossed), but alas not yet. Sorry all!

Wait, you can make that thing even faster?

HN is painfully slow to me, partly because it chokes under load, and partly because nearly all software is painfully slow to me. It can definitely get a lot faster.

Another tracker with lots of outages in the US/EU: https://www.pingdom.com/outages/

I setup a few ping monitors and have been trouble routing to Google all day. Intermittent packet loss. The other three I setup (Cloudflare, L3, and ATT) are all good. Funny enough I have Google Fiber, so I really have no clue what's going on.

Might some of the trouble be related to the lower Manhattan internet outage today? https://hellgatenyc.com/lower-manhattans-internet-is-down

> "We have identified the problem as a street cut impacting hundreds of fiber-optic strands"

Not sure if this would cause larger regional harm, but anecdotally there were issues connecting to our US east VPN at work.

Interesting, usually this sort of thing turns up on the NANOG mailing list, but it's been pretty quiet over there.

NANOG seems mostly dead these days?

It was so active 10+ years ago, but I think it's basically gone?

Yeah I'm not sure what's up with that... I remember reading a thread on it last year about fires at various Colo DC'S.

I don't know if this was related, but earlier today my personal internet dropped to 1mbps down for at least 30 minutes. Also had 40% packet loss using the cloudflare speed test on a wired connection. East coast, USA.

I had the same thing happen. I assumed it was my suboptimal wifi setup acting up again and almost got back to researching mesh systems.

I’ve come to love powerline adapters when expanding Wi-Fi coverage just in case you haven’t looked into them. Speeds of the latest adapters are up to 2.4Gbps!

hardwired APs > mesh

We had what seemed like full connectivity loss for about 5 minutes this morning. Came back as quick as it went, Spectrum fiber outside Raleigh, NC.

I thought it was related to the big UFO disclosure drop^0. Suppress! Ha ha ha :)

0: https://thedebrief.org/intelligence-officials-say-u-s-has-re...

One additional data point that I didn't see mentioned elsewhere yet:

Earlier today it took ~10 minutes for a Cloudflare worker of mine to be updated after a deployment was made. This usually happens instantly.

Very likely unrelated to a hypothetical wider outage, but thought I'd share anyway.

There’s a saying on HN: major outages often come from DNS. It was also DNS in the recent WhatsApp outage thread. I’m wondering what the source of the possible broader internet slowness is.

https://soundcloud.com/ryan-flowers-916961339/dns-to-the-tun...

Perhaps. Our outlook mail failed today. They said its back, but its still kind of flaky.

Oh shit. I assumed outlook was being flaky because my inbox is 10gb.

Nothing. Have seen ones over 125gb. Something to strive for? ;)

Yep, my Outlook mail for work is being flaky. I get notifications of new messages but can’t read the messages (mobile)

Microsoft is having a huge M365 outage: https://twitter.com/MSFT365Status

Here in Europe traffic to cloud services from US based companies has been sluggish or completely disfunctional for days.

For example: Microsoft's Xbox app works but is superslow, and this weekend I couldn't even sign in in the EA app anymore for some reason.

HN has been slow/failing for me today. I assumed it was the WWDC keynote, in particular the One More Thing...

Um what? That’s not how the internet works.

HN having server issues when a single post gets 1200 comments in two hours is pretty normal. I don't think any issues with the wider internet are implied

I think they meant the keynote resulted in massive traffic to HN resulting in HN giving itself the hug of death.

Totally plausible provided the overlap in communities.

I like the second-order effect here, of measuring how people TALK about the outage to measure the outage.

Have a read of:

“Is my Internet down?”: Sifting through User-Affecting Outages with Google Trends Ege Cem Kırcı, Martin Vahlensieck, and Laurent Vanbever IMC '22

which is also discussed on PING (podcast at APNIC) and on the APNIC blog (disclaimer: I helped publish this)

https://blog.apnic.net/2023/02/10/towards-a-systematic-user-...

https://blubrry.com/ping_podcast/93464445/is-my-internet-dow...

Now I'm wondering if this is how I got "Server Error" while trying to initiate a POTS call. First time I've ever gotten that.

HN also feels sluggish today.

As in, something spoke the words "Server Error" to you when you tried to dial out?

No, actually, the Android phone app put those on the screen.

(And yeah, not the more familiar/classic POTS voice message "We're sorry, the number you dialed…")

(Quite … uselessly, too. An error in text form when the phone is against my ear is not helpful.)

POTS has "no mobile capabilities" and is strictly "analog signal transmission over copper loops" [0] so I suspect that's the source of confusion in this case.

PSTN is probably the acronym you meant, which refers to "Originally a network of fixed-line analog telephone systems, the PSTN is almost entirely digital in its core network and includes mobile and wireless networks" [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_old_telephone_service

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_switched_telephone_netw...

Ha, duly noted. Same system to me, I guess. Still a new, never before seen error.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36202624

https://cybernews.com/security/microsoft-outlook-outage-anon...

HN and Reddit have been tanking for hours for me.

All of the MS subscription stuff seems to be slow today: https://www.cbsnews.com/philadelphia/news/microsoft-outlook-...

Most of the websites I use have been fine, outside of the odd hiccups while browsing HN.

HN is working without issue for me if I log out of my account. I was worried that my account was suspended for some unknown reason until I saw this post.

Logged-out page views hit the cache. Logged-in ones don’t.

It is the hiccup that have been worring me in the past week. I've gotten 502 or error json files from banking, imdb, online doc for some api, gmail, but a retry fixed the issue always. It is not as sexy as all websites are down, but all website are of dubious quality now.

according to that website it's something called 'china unicorn backbone' that went down

Oh thats weird. China was looking OK when I posted this, but now its lighting up too.

China Unicom

https://www.chinaunicom.com.hk/en/global/home.php

Keming strikes again

Although neither title is in the hyperlinked-to pages, the title here is answered by the title at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36202624 .

Yeah, I saw this one before I started the thread, but it was marked as dead and I couldnt reply.

microsoft 365 is down https://downdetector.com/status/microsoft-365/

Had trouble with Google Chat messages getting queued. They automatically retried and were delivered only after restarting the device (Android). This was approximately 2.5 hours ago.

I’ve had problems in the UK with Netflix and PlayStation network.

HN was slow today https://files.catbox.moe/13t78u.jpeg

No, it's just HN going crazy for shiny new Apples.

What if we took down _every_ website for our product announcements??

- some Apple PM, probably

You win the internet today.

Not much of a prize, today, maybe you can get a rain check.

I thought I was being restricted by admin when I wasn’t able to upvote posts on HN, glad to know I’m not the only one.

I’m seeing slowness across-the-board today

In Bucharest I've had problems throughout the day. Most noticeably just now while streaming on HBO Max.

I blame it on Diablo 4 launch.

HN Slow..... Outlook failing for me, some other sites a bit slower than usual

Uber was pretty spotty in the UK for a few hours today across multiple devices

I guess it was a bad day to try out my new internet provider...

Had internet outage from the cable ISP.

developer.apple.com for account management has also been down most of the day.

They always take down apple.com during a WWDC

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