The Internet Report ThousandEyes

We’ve got an election coming up here in the US, and over the last several weeks, we have been analyzing a dozen or so state election websites to take a closer look at how they’re hosted (e.g., do they use a CDN or are they self-hosted?) and to monitor them for outages. In this episode, we discuss the pros and cons of each hosting method and dive into some examples we’ve seen where election websites have had unexpected performance degradation. Catch this week’s episode to go under the hood on the websites powering the upcoming presidential election—and don’t forget to get out there and vote!

. In this week’s episode, we discuss two notable outages that happened last week. The first, at Twitter, took place on October 15 around 5:30 pm PST and impacted users’ ability to tweet or re-tweet. According to Twitter’s official statement, an internal system error was the culprit—putting to bed any theories of another hack. The second outage took place at the transit provider, Zayo, in the early morning hours of October 13. Although the outage seemed to mostly involve interfaces on the US west coast, Denver and the southwest (as well as a handful of other global locations), the impact of the outage was not very severe due to the time of the outage, which was outside of US business hours. Watch this week’s episode to hear more about these two outages.

This is The Internet Report, where we uncover what’s working and what’s breaking on the Internet—and why. In this week’s episode, we dive into a recent outage at Slack that caused intermittent issues for its enterprise users (including ourselves) for nearly a full day. The cause, as noted by Slack, was on the backend and related to an overloaded database. Next, we dig into another outage at Microsoft. According to their statement, a bug in an internal update seems to have revoked the routes to a number of devices that were believed to be unhealthy—thereby creating congestion in the rest of their network. This explanation jives with the increased packet loss we observed during this time period. Don’t miss this week’s episode, where we walk through these outages in depth

This is The Internet Report, where we uncover what’s working and what’s breaking on the Internet—and why. On today’s episode, we dive into a recent Azure AD disruption that significantly impacted access to Microsoft cloud services and apps (as well as third-party apps) for nearly three hours. We then went under the hood on a recent BGP hijacking in which Telstra began announcing routes to services that didn’t belong to it, such as Quad9. Catch this episode to hear our take on these incidents, and see below for show links, some additional commentary on these outages, and a sneak preview of next week’s episode.

On today’s episode, Angelique and I cover off on a couple outages that occurred over the past week. First, we discuss an application outage at Instagram that occurred on September 17th and lasted around 30 minutes. We also discuss a network outage on September 14th on the AWS backbone near Columbus, Ohio. This outage was a little more widespread, affecting nearly 100 interfaces and lasting around 30 minutes. Next, we dive into the upcoming bans on WeChat and TikTok, which have now been temporarily extended by a Federal judge, and then we walk through some of the network architecture differences between these two applications and how a potential shutdown could be enforced.

It was another quiet week on the Internet, so we wanted to spend some time answering your questions around some recent outages. Catch this episode as we discuss how you can understand the upstream relationships of the services you rely on to assess your risk profile. We also cover why SLAs fall short in protecting your business in the event of an outage, and why you need to proactively collaborate with your providers to solve issues faster.