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Last week was amazon, now its microsoft

TheCatWoman

Is the internet in danger of crashing all together, will we have to have it rationed, is it running out of resourses?

How will/would society cope if two systems went down together, let alone all 3 big systems, it seems incredible that there are only 3 main systems world wide, I know there are some smaller ones, but shouldn't we have some sort of national back up plan. I know people who go into a blind panic when they have no signal, how will they cope if theres no internet, they can't order a takeaway, can't go shopping, can't do banking? Will dinosaurs like me who remember how to do things with pen and paper suddenly be in demand?

Parents

  • What happened to Microsoft? I didn't see any headlines of major service outages for them or notice anything stopped working. 

    TheCatWoman said:
    shouldn't we have some sort of national back up plan.

    The nature of the technology does not lend itself to backups in the conventional sense. The centralised services like DNS which failed for Amazon are a single point of failure for most systems and by their nature don't work well with distributed backups to come online if one fails. 

    They already have this built in but if that ability to locate the backup fails from the same root cause then it is pointless.

    TheCatWoman said:
    Will dinosaurs like me who remember how to do things with pen and paper suddenly be in demand?

    Alas no because nobody will be able to get a hold of you - their phones won't be working to search for you.

    Besides, they will want stuff that is online and you can't provide anyway.

    Should the internet go down in a long term way then society will take a massive hit. Logistics for getting food etc sent to shops will fail, payment mechanisms will fail, factories probably won't be able to operate and their supply chains will fail too.

    Healthcare can work to a degree but so much is on computers or needs the NHS systems online to run the scanners etc that only basic services could run.

    You can see why the internet is a target for any military action these days.

Reply

  • What happened to Microsoft? I didn't see any headlines of major service outages for them or notice anything stopped working. 

    TheCatWoman said:
    shouldn't we have some sort of national back up plan.

    The nature of the technology does not lend itself to backups in the conventional sense. The centralised services like DNS which failed for Amazon are a single point of failure for most systems and by their nature don't work well with distributed backups to come online if one fails. 

    They already have this built in but if that ability to locate the backup fails from the same root cause then it is pointless.

    TheCatWoman said:
    Will dinosaurs like me who remember how to do things with pen and paper suddenly be in demand?

    Alas no because nobody will be able to get a hold of you - their phones won't be working to search for you.

    Besides, they will want stuff that is online and you can't provide anyway.

    Should the internet go down in a long term way then society will take a massive hit. Logistics for getting food etc sent to shops will fail, payment mechanisms will fail, factories probably won't be able to operate and their supply chains will fail too.

    Healthcare can work to a degree but so much is on computers or needs the NHS systems online to run the scanners etc that only basic services could run.

    You can see why the internet is a target for any military action these days.

Children
  • in reply to Iain
    Iain said:
    What happened to Microsoft?

    I take it back - the BBC posted this a few minutes ago:

    https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3rj45n4x5eo

    Heathrow, NatWest and Minecraft are among some of the sites and services experiencing problems amid a global Microsoft outage.

    As expected it is the NDS at fault:

    It said this was due to "DNS issues" - the same root cause of the huge Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage last week.

    I have engaged the services of DNS protection companies in the past who protect against DDOS (distributed denial of service) attacks but these tend to only work for individual sites, not the DNS services themselves.

    Maybe the companies will evolve techniques to protect agains this but then the attackers will evolve new ways of attacking them. This has always been the way it works on the web.

    I don't see there being any way to prevent it from happening from time to time so we may just have to live with the expectation that there will be outages.