Internet outage

An Internet outage or Internet blackout is the complete or partial failure of the internet services. It can occur due to censorship, cyberattacks, disasters,[1] police or security services actions[2] or errors.

Disruptions of submarine communications cables may cause blackouts or slowdowns to large areas. Countries with a less developed Internet infrastructure are more vulnerable due to small numbers of high-capacity links.

A line of research finds that the Internet with it having a "hub-like" core structure that makes it robust to random losses of nodes but also fragile to targeted attacks on key components − the highly connected nodes or "hubs".[3]

List

Year	Name	Country or region	Affected users	Number of affected users (rough)	Description	Duration (rough)	Internet component	Cause	Entity responsible	Type
2008	2008 submarine cable disruption	Middle East and Mediterranean Sea			Three separate incidents of major damage to submarine optical communication cables around the world occurred in 2008. The first incident caused damage involving up to five high-speed Internet submarine communications cables in the Mediterranean Sea and Middle East from 23 January to 4 February 2008, causing internet disruptions and slowdowns for users in the Middle East and India.[4] In late February there was another outage, this time affecting a fiber optic connection between Singapore and Jakarta.[5] On 19 December, FLAG FEA, GO-1, SEA-ME-WE 3, and SEA-ME-WE 4 were all cut.[6][7][8]		submarine cables	Un­known	Un­known
2011	2011 submarine cable disruption	South Asia and Middle East			Two incidents of submarine communications cables cut off on 25 December 2011. The first cut off occurred to SEA-ME-WE 3 at Suez canal, Egypt and the second cut off occurred to i2i which took place between Chennai, India and Singapore line. Both the incidents had caused the Internet disruptions and slowdowns for users in the South Asia and Middle East in particular UAE.[9][10][11][12]		submarine cables	Un­known	Un­known
2011		Armenia		3,000,000	A woman digging for scrap metal damaged land cables and thereby severed most connectivity for the nation of Armenia.[13]	5 hours	land cables	digging		Full
2011		Egypt			The Internet in Egypt was shut down by the government, whereby approximately 93%[14] of networks were without access in 2011 in an attempt to stop mobilization for anti-government protests.[15]		ISPs	government censorship	Egypt	Full
2012	2012 Syrian internet outage	Syria			On 29 November 2012 the Syrian Internet was cut off from the rest of the world. The autonomous system (AS29386) of Syrian Telecommunication Establishment (STE) was cut off completely at 10:26 UTC. Five prefixes were reported to have remained up, this is why Dyn[16] reports an outage of 92% of the country. Responsibility for the outage has somewhat speculatively been blamed on various organizations.[17][18]			Unknown	Unknown
2016		Germany	Deutsche Telekom	900,000	At the end of November 2016 0.9 million routers, from Deutsche Telekom and produced by Arcadyan, were crashed due to failed TR-064 exploitation attempts by a variant of Mirai, which resulted in Internet connectivity problems for the users of these devices.[19][20] While TalkTalk later patched their routers, a new variant of Mirai was discovered in TalkTalk routers.[21][22][23]	1 day	Internet routers	cyberattack	Un­known	Full
2016		Liberia		Un­known	Mirai has also been used in an attack on Liberia's Internet infrastructure in November 2016.[24][25][26]			cyberattack	Un­known	Full
2016	2016 Dyn cyberattack	United States	Dyn (company)		The cyberattack took place on October 21, 2016, and involved multiple distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS attacks) targeting systems operated by Domain Name System (DNS) provider Dyn, which caused major Internet platforms and services to be unavailable to large swathes of users in Europe and North America.[27][28] As a DNS provider, Dyn provides to end-users the service of mapping an Internet domain name—when, for instance, entered into a web browser—to its corresponding IP address. The distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack was accomplished through a large number of DNS lookup requests from tens of millions of IP addresses.[29] The activities are believed to have been executed through a botnet consisting of a large number of Internet-connected devices—such as printers, IP cameras, residential gateways and baby monitors—that had been infected with the Mirai malware. With an estimated throughput of 1.2 terabits per second, the attack is, according to experts, the largest DDoS attack on record.[30]	1 day	Domain Name System (DNS) provider	cyberattack	Un­known	Major websites
2017		Cameroon	South-West and North-West of Cameroon	20% of the country's population	On January 17, around 20 percent of the people in Cameroon had their Internet blocked due to recent anti-government protests.[31][32][33]	270 days or 8 months		government censorship	Cameroon	Full
2017		North Korea			On October 1, The autonomous system (AS131279) of Star JV was cut off completely, due to alleged US cyber attack[34][35][36]	9 hours and 31 minutes		cyberattack	United States	Full
2019	Verizon and BGP Optimizer	United States	Verizon (company)		On June 24, 2019, many parts of the Internet faced an unprecedented outage as Verizon, the popular Internet transit provider accidentally rerouted IP packages after it wrongly accepted a network misconfiguration from a small ISP in Pennsylvania, USA.[37] According to The Register, systems around the planet were automatically updated, and connections destined for Facebook, Cloudflare, and others, ended up going through DQE and Allegheny, which buckled under the strain, causing traffic to disappear into a black hole.[38]	3 hours	Internet transit provider	misconfiguration	Un­known	Major websites
2019	Iranian internet shutdown	Iran			The Internet in Iran was shut down by the government, whereby approximately 96% of networks were without access in an attempt to stop mobilization for anti-government protests.	7 days	ISPs	government censorship	Iran	Full
2019	Internet shutdown in India	India		50,000,000	The Government of India passed the Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019 which caused huge controversy and mass protest in various parts of India. In order to prevent protests and outrage on social media, various state governments including those of Assam, Tripura, Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh, West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh decided to shut down internet access.	Up to 9 days Over one year (Kashmir)[39][40]		government censorship	Various State governments of India	Full
2019	2019 Burmese internet shutdown	Myanmar			On June 21, the Internet in Burma was shut down by the government. The Burmese government shut down the internet connection in nine townships of the northern Arakan State and one single township in the Southern Chin State, which was proposed by Burmese Military officers. The shutdown is ongoing, and has become the world's longest internet shutdown.			Government censorship	Burma	Full
2019	2019 Papua protests	Indonesia			To curb the escalating protests occurred in the Indonesian provinces of Papua and West Papua, Indonesian authority imposed an internet blackout on both provinces on 21 August 2019. The blackout continues until the authority partially lift the blackout in 4 September on several regions, with complete lifting of the restriction only occurred in 9 September.[41]	19 days		Government censorship	Indonesia	Full
Year	Name	Country or region	Affected users	Number of affected users (rough)	Description	Duration (rough)	Internet component	Cause	Entity responsible	Type

Prevention

Internet outages can be prevented by a more resilient, decentralized Internet architecture.[42]

Management

Modern society, especially in developed countries, depends heavily on the Internet not just for communication. There have been some measures taken and possibilities exist for managing and countering a large-scale Internet outage.

Temporary alternative forms of communication

Meshnets

See also

• Internet kill switch – Single shut off mechanism for all Internet traffic
• Internet censorship in the Arab Spring
• Just-in-time blocking
• Cyberwarfare – Use of digital attacks to attack a nation
• Cyberweapon – Malware agent
• Decentralization § Centralization and redecentralization of the Internet
• Critical Internet infrastructure
• Critical infrastructure protection
• Internet backbone – Vital infrastructure of the networks of the Internet
• Power outage – loss of electric power to an area
• Communications blackout – Halt to communication abilities or utilization
• Network congestion – Reduced quality of service due to high network traffic
• Malware – A portmanteau for malicious software
• DDoS
• Protests against SOPA and PIPA – Protest

References

1. Petersen, Hauke; Baccelli, Emmanuel; Wählisch, Matthias; Schmidt, Thomas C.; Schiller, Jochen (27 October 2014). "The Role of the Internet of Things in Network Resilience". Internet of Things. IoT Infrastructures. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering. Springer, Cham. 151: 283–296. arXiv:1406.6614. Bibcode:2014arXiv1406.6614P. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-19743-2_39. ISBN 978-3-319-19742-5. S2CID 10378226.
2. Ellis-Petersen, Hannah; correspondent, a local (2020-01-05). "'Many lives have been lost': five-month internet blackout plunges Kashmir into crisis". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 2020-01-24.
3. Doyle, John C.; Alderson, David L.; Li, Lun; Low, Steven; Roughan, Matthew; Shalunov, Stanislav; Tanaka, Reiko; Willinger, Walter (11 October 2005). "The "robust yet fragile" nature of the Internet". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 102 (41): 14497–14502. Bibcode:2005PNAS..10214497D. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.218.6287. doi:10.1073/pnas.0501426102. ISSN 0027-8424. PMC 1240072. PMID 16204384.
4. "Cable damage hits one million Internet Users". Khaleej News. 2008-02-04. Archived from the original on 9 February 2008. Retrieved 2008-02-04.
5. "Internet capacity down to 10%". The Jakarta Post. 2008-02-29. Archived from the original on 3 March 2008. Retrieved 1 March 2008.
6. Fried, Malcolm; Klemming, Lars (2008-12-19). "Severed Cables in Mediterranean Disrupt Communication (Update4)". Bloomberg. Retrieved 2009-01-12.
7. "GO submarine cable fault part of wider disruption between Italy and Egypt". timesofmalta.com. 2008-12-19. Archived from the original on 25 December 2008. Retrieved 2009-01-12.
8. "Mediterrean submarine cables are cut, affecting internet". Telecompaper. 19 December 2008. Retrieved 2009-01-12.
9. "Deep sea cable snap will make Internet slower: du". khaleejtimes.com. 27 December 2011. Archived from the original on 27 December 2011. Retrieved 27 December 2011.
10. "Cable cut slows down Internet in UAE". emirates247.com. 26 December 2011. Archived from the original on 22 January 2013. Retrieved 27 December 2011.
11. "Cable cuts could slow Emirates Internet". finance.yahoo.com. 26 December 2011. Archived from the original on 5 March 2016. Retrieved 27 December 2011.
12. "du alerts customers over disruption in Internet services". gulftoday.ae. 27 December 2011. Archived from the original on 8 January 2012. Retrieved 27 December 2011.
13. "Georgian woman cuts off web access to whole of Armenia". The Guardian. 6 April 2011. Archived from the original on 25 August 2013. Retrieved 11 April 2012.
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16. "77 networks out in Syria - Internet Events Bulletin". b2b.renesys.com. Archived from the original on 2019-01-07. Retrieved 2019-01-08.
17. "How Syria Turned Off the Internet". The Cloudflare Blog. 2012-11-29. Archived from the original on 2019-01-08. Retrieved 2019-01-08.
18. Ackerman, Spencer (2014-08-13). "Snowden: NSA accidentally caused Syria's internet blackout in 2012". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Archived from the original on 2018-09-13. Retrieved 2019-01-08.
19. Krebs, Brian (30 November 2016). "New Mirai Worm Knocks 900K Germans Offline". krebsonsecurity.com. Archived from the original on 20 December 2016. Retrieved 14 December 2016.
20. "German leaders angry at cyberattack, hint at Russian involvement". Deutsche Welle. Archived from the original on 5 January 2017. Retrieved 5 January 2017.
21. "New Mirai Variant Embeds in TalkTalk Home Routers". www.incapsula.com. 7 December 2016. Archived from the original on 2016-12-22. Retrieved 2016-12-18.
22. "Hackers suspected as 900,000 hit by internet outage". Archived from the original on 20 February 2017. Retrieved 19 February 2017.
23. "German internet outage was failed botnet attempt: report". Reuters. 29 November 2016. Archived from the original on 20 February 2017. Retrieved 19 February 2017.
24. McGoogan, Cara (4 November 2016). "Unprecedented cyber attack takes Liberia's entire internet down". The Telegraph. Archived from the original on 21 November 2016. Retrieved 21 November 2016.
25. "DDoS attack from Mirai malware 'killing business' in Liberia". PCWorld. 3 November 2016. Archived from the original on 22 November 2016. Retrieved 21 November 2016.
26. "Massive cyber-attack grinds Liberia's internet to a halt". The Guardian. 3 November 2016. Archived from the original on 21 November 2016. Retrieved 21 November 2016.
27. Etherington, Darrell; Conger, Kate. "Many sites including Twitter, Shopify and Spotify suffering outage". TechCrunch. Archived from the original on 2016-10-21. Retrieved 2016-10-21.
28. "The Possible Vendetta Behind the East Coast Web Slowdown". Bloomberg.com. Archived from the original on 2016-10-22. Retrieved 2016-10-21.
29. Newman, Lily Hay. "What We Know About Friday's Massive East Coast Internet Outage". WIRED. Archived from the original on 2016-10-22. Retrieved 2016-10-21.
30. Woolf, Nicky (2016-10-26). "DDoS attack that disrupted internet was largest of its kind in history, experts say". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Archived from the original on 2016-10-27. Retrieved 2016-10-28.
31. Condliffe, Jamie. "Cameroon's Internet outage is damaging the country's economy". MIT Technology Review. Retrieved 20 February 2017.
32. "Why has Cameroon blocked the internet?". BBC News. 8 February 2017. Archived from the original on 21 February 2017. Retrieved 20 February 2017.
33. "Google coding champion whose Cameroon hometown is cut off from the internet". BBC News. 10 February 2017. Archived from the original on 21 February 2017. Retrieved 20 February 2017.
34. "Sony hack: North Korea back online after internet outage".
35. "North Korea's Internet Comes Back on After About 9 Hours".
36. "North Korea Gets New Internet Link via Russia".
37. "How Verizon and a BGP Optimizer caused a major internet outage affecting Amazon, Facebook, CloudFlare among others". Archived from the original on 2019-06-26. Retrieved 2019-06-26.
38. "BGP super-blunder: How Verizon today sparked a 'cascading catastrophic failure' that knackered Cloudflare, Amazon, etc". The Register. 2019-06-24. Archived from the original on 2019-06-26. Retrieved 2019-06-26.
39. "Kashmir Internet Shutdown Continues, Despite Supreme Court Ruling". thediplomat.com. Retrieved 2021-02-03.
40. "India's Internet shutdown in Kashmir is the longest ever in a democracy". 16 December 2019.
41. Briantika, Adi (3 June 2020). "Presiden & Menkominfo Diputus Bersalah Blokir Internet Papua" (in Indonesian). Tirto.id. Retrieved 23 June 2020.
42. Hiner, Jason. "Takeaways from Egypt: Kill the kill switch and decentralize the Internet". ZDNet. Archived from the original on 20 February 2017. Retrieved 19 February 2017.

External links

• The Internet could crash. We need a Plan B, TED talk by Danny Hillis
• Redecentralize.org