[Outages-discussion] [outages] FB down?

[George Herbert]

On Sun, Apr 25, 2010 at 2:38 PM, Jay Hennigan <jay at west.net> wrote:
> On 4/24/10 1:21 PM, Frank Bulk wrote:
>> If you're saying that the members would like to know every time that that
>> mom 'n pop home page is down, then I would recommend you start another
>> outages listserv.
>>
>> When Jay made the reference to "Web service providers of a Certain Size", I
>> understood him to mean those who might make Alexa's top 1000, and I think
>> most of the listserv members feel the same way.
>>
>> Size does matter.
>
> Agreed.  Case in point:  A few years ago Yahoo was the subject of a DDoS
> attack.  Our support staff got buried in calls wanting to know why the
> internet was down.
>
> It turns out that lots of people have Yahoo as their home page.  They
> didn't appreciate that there was more to "The Internet".  They fired up
> their web browser, got an error, and called their ISP.
>
> Similarly, an outage of Facebook, EBay, etc. is likely to result in
> customers calling their provider.
>
> If http://podunkdialupisp.com/~hilda/photos-of-my-cat.html is down, we
> probably don't need to hear about it.
>
> --
> Jay Hennigan - CCIE #7880 - Network Engineering - jay at impulse.net
> Impulse Internet Service  -  http://www.impulse.net/
> Your local telephone and internet company - 805 884-6323 - WB6RDV

Sometimes the users are even the fastest notification.

My first indication of the 1994 Northridge earthquake was when a user
in Atlanta who (without exaggeration) spent 23 hrs a day on IRC called
the support duty pager to say that his net link was down.

The page arrived early enough that I had the TV on as the breaking
news hit all the networks, which was about 2 min after the shaking
ended.


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com