[Outages-discussion] [EXTERNAL] Re: [outages] Outages Digest, Vol 184, Issue 18

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Thu, Feb 22, 2024 at 10:50:28PM +0100, Bill Woodcock via Outages-discussion wrote:
> >>> On Fri, 23 Feb 2024 at 02:32, Gershon Chapman via Outages <outages at outages.org> wrote:
> >>> I strongly suspect this to be a BGP issue, and it's going to be a good 24 hours before we see the issue getting any better.
> I haven’t seen anything to suggest that their data network was involved.

And even if it was, employees wouldn't be allowed to speak about it
publicly else risk termination and/or legal action.

Other than 911 being unavailable, I expect everyone will forget about
this incident within a month.

For Brad: yes, there are (lots and lots and lots) of internal (read:
private) AT&T network devices of all kinds, including those relevant
to mobile.  No, those are not "tracked publicly" -- and that is very
intentional (any worthwhile company segregates private/internal vs.
external/public-facing networks/devices/etc. and AT&T is no exception).

What you're referring to when you talk about "whole countries shutting
down their gateways" is with regards to disabling BGP sessions or
denouncing routes to shut themselves off from the Internet, or
effectively "filter" something by making it inaccessible.  That data
(Internet-facing route withdrawals) is public.  You can use public tools
or sites like BGPlay or RIPEstat/RIS to look at that, but it's mainly
for network administrators or those who know what they're doing and what
they're looking at.

I haven't seen anyone discuss whether or not that happened with AT&T,
but I suspect it did not (otherwise it's likely that AT&T as a whole
would have fallen off the Internet).  That would likely be NANOG
material... oh look: https://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2024-February/225036.html

I suspect there is a SPoF of some sort that may not be network-related
at all.  Doubtful we'll ever know what that is.

Nothing more from me to say on this matter.

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                 jdc at koitsu.org |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                      PGP 0x2A389531 |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.                        |