I remember experts saying 5 or 10 years ago that the increased standardization and centralization of the internet would lead to more frequent and widespread internet blackouts.
First AWS, and now this. It looks like they’re right.
Two things happen when we centralize. Doesn’t matter if it’s big business or infrastructure.
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Profits go up for the controlling few
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consumers get fucked.
We get fucked when things go wrong, the system fails, our data gets hacked, our power goes out, our rents go up, insurance rates go up… etc etc. MegaCorps all say sorry, give us 50¢ off our next purchase and a free credit check, and carry on while we eat the losses and increasing costs.
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Are we just forgetting the gigantic Crowdstrike outage a year ago by Microsoft that halted air traffic for a full day?
You know back in my day websites would protect themselves, as was the style at the time.
Now a days they just get cloudflare and put up a cookie notice.
Just one of those things lazy devs do.
Why reinvent the wheel.
It’s not lazy, they just spend that time on other features.
The Internet is way more secure today, partially because of centralised security efforts. Like if a site is behind Cloudflare you might aswell just not try.
Ya. Like popups and cookie notices.
Well the average website isn’t going to be able to protect itself from DDoS attacks or easily provide local cache copies of its content in multiple regions all over the world or create secured tunnels protected from general attacks. My company was affected by this and we are putting in contingency plans for this happening again but the whiteboard that we’ve created with all the features we need to reinvent is very full…
It even took down the very instance we’re posting this on.
The snark of the following comment is not directed towards you, OP, but at the tech industry at large.
What I don’t understand is why people are still surprised when this shit happens. Today, cloudflare takes down half the internet, last month it was AWS. Crowdstrike did it last year even more severely. Akamai has also caused major issues like this before, as has Google. M365/azure outages barely get reported on because they are so frequent. Yet, they are all still being used to hold up most of our infrastructure. Every single company I’ve done IT for has used at least one of these companies for critical infrastructure. There just aren’t any other realistic options due to the refusal of non IT people to learn about IT.
If you try to use something other than one of the big companies, you’re hit with one or more roadblocks.
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You “don’t have the budget” to selfhost. Bean counters would rather pay $100 a month indefinitely than $5k to buy new hardware that will save $1000 a month for years.
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No approval for non giant corpo option, because using AWS is cheaper and has brand recognition. This is due to the same economics and myopia that caused Walmart to be one of the only places you can get groceries.
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There is no other option. Every year that goes by, more small companies get gobbled up by big tech M&A. Unless your company opts to create its own implementation of a service/software, you’re stuck with one of only a few options, even if you could get the approval to use something not run on big tech.
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Even if you manage to jump all of the previous hurdles, the Internet connected software you’re using probably relies on big tech infrastructure too. Every company has to navigate all of these hurdles for every saas/infrastructure implementation, and the only ones that successfully do it have to have leadership that not only understands why the decisions have to be made, but also need to be willing to accept the extra cost. Anyone that has dealt with upper management knows that this is exceptionally rare.
So what we are left with is a system that every professional knows is deeply broken and monopolized. The people that actually make the final decisions are largely ignorant and unwilling to invest money in fixing it, instead choosing short term savings and lack of commitment over long term security and continuity.
I hear where you are coming from, but I think your criticisms are misdirected. For the majority of businesses, using an infrastructure provider is a sensible decision that leads to greater security and stability in the long run for less money than trying to build the same thing on their own. This isn’t a decision made out of stubbornness, laziness, or ignorance about IT. It’s simply that it’s the better option for each individual business.
But when most companies make the decision to use an infrastructure provider, outages and risks are centralized. As you pointed out, the services you rely on are likely to use a provider even if you don’t use one, so this isn’t a problem that a business can solve by buying a server and hiring an IT team. These massive failures aren’t a sign that businesses need to make different decisions. It’s a sign that the infrastructure providers must work harder and spend more money to improve their internal isolation.
When a bridge collapses because the pedestrians happen to walk in step with the resonant frequency of the bridge, we don’t blame the pedestrians for walking incorrectly or for deciding to take the bridge instead of a boat. We blame the designer of the bridge for failing to account for the mundane stresses that the bridge is expected to sustain.
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Being a good CDN is an expensive exercise that requires the ability to run POPs in many countries around the world.
Cloudflare captured the market by basically being simultaneously much cheaper, better distributed and ultimately better performing than the incumbents at the time (Akamai and Limelight IIRC)
The rest of the story is capitalism doing capitalist things
I didn’t even notice that it went down.
It took down a fifth of the Internet, not half.
I found two websites that didn’t work, that’s it.
A third of the “top 100” were in that 1/5th total. Most websites I personally wanted were down, including lemmy for me.
Lemmy and ipchicken.com were down for me.
Most corporate IT hires fucking morons as admins :(
More than likely it’s their management who are the morons.
One does not exclude the other :/
I’ve been a contractor most of my career and I can assure you, fair share of ID10Ts in my circles as well.
Those are the ones that get occasionally hired as admins for someone’s corporate IT ;)
So, and I’m gonna pull my shameless plug ofc, but what about a decentralised internet?
Check out tenfingers or the sub (I put the weblink, is it !lemmy.world/c/tenfingers on lemmy browser apps?).
What about we take the internet back?
This seems interesting but I struggle to see how it helps, seems more like its for file sharing. Or is the suggestion that it could form the host side of a web ecosystem, with files for websites hosted in this decentralised way?
Exactly.
File sharing, a chat, backup systems, are just the low hanging fruit IMO. You can make a takedown safe “web” presence, with whatever you want on it. Decentralised, accessible with your PC off. And FOSS.
You can try it out, the new “web” WIP, if you have a couple of minutes and access yo a PC (Linux works, would love to get feedback from other platforms).
Because one company offers a good service many people like, and no other company is doing it, od doing it as well as cloudflare. We are also talking about a security feature where not having it and getting hacked, may be well worse than a few hours of downtime.
Cloudflare is not necessary for the internet at all. People choose to use them.
It’s good that it goes down once in a while, so that people notice.
I think it’s very concerning, but not exactly surprising. It makes sense that there ends up being market leaders for digital services, because they can provide economies of scale much more than traditional services. As another commentor pointed out, they’re are alternatives, even just for back-up service providers, but most sites don’t pay for them.
What was more personally distressing was I realised how much I rely on lemmy when my instance, and backup instance, both went down. I’m not sure where I’d go for immediate news, especially about something niche like “why is lemmy down?”. I don’t use other social media and I found myself checking r/redditalternatives just to see if there was some info about the shutdown. Obviously, it was useless because reddit…
it’s very concerning, but what are the alternatives?
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I have to look into something like this, thanks for the resource
Fastly?
Well, lemmy. That worked fine.
my lemmy was down
You need to create your own Lemmy, with blackjack and hookers.
Multiple instances gives redundancy
Amazon the other week, then this. Really does show how vulnerable much of the net is
I barely noticed
