Undersea Cable Outage. See what "The Register" says

[MetaWraith]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/34242.html

nuff said

[Neil]

http://forum.nthellworld.co.uk/showthread.php?t=4531

[Frank]

Put under extra pressure, NTL's DNS servers failed, she said. That meant users were unable to log onto Web sites using their host name, even though the sites were reachable to users who knew their IP address.

total BS. The ntl's DNS failed, so I changed to multiple others. nslookup's worked fine, but the sites were still totally unreachable.

Email and other services were hosed for the same reason.

Mmmmmmmmm

The story of crying wolf springs to mind - perhaps if we hadn't had so many lies and BS before, then the point about this outage affecting ntl's e-mail servers would be slightly more believable.

[Shaun]

Originally Posted by Keyser

The story of crying wolf springs to mind - perhaps if we hadn't had so many lies and BS before, then the point about this outage affecting ntl's e-mail servers would be slightly more believable.

It is not clear to me why losing one link to the US should affect NTL's service so much, although it seems that the main problem was to do with the domain name system, so that customers could not find the websites or e-mail servers they were looking for.

Take from here

I think they were two separate problems, one being a slow connection to the USA due to ONE cable being down, and the other being Ntl's DNS down AGAIN!

[beardsley]

Maybe NTL thought that the cable problem was too good an excuse to miss using for all of the current problems.

Maybe I could fail to pay my bill and blame it on that as well ?

BBC Online's weekly article by Bill Thompson covers this issue, and specifically the loss of his NTL connection, and in that he questions NTL's excuses for the loss of all services.

[BBKing]

Quick googly (and I've been off all week so haven't got the gen on this issue) - which DNS servers do you think ntl's email system uses? Given that a failure of DNS can affect any other network that relies on knowing who it is and where it is it's perfectly plausible that a DNS failure caused by increased traffic could cause email issues. Whether it should is the question - I maintain that management and basic ISP systems such as email shouldn't use resources subject to variable load from customers as this opens up the way to 'domino' effects and race conditions where failures can propogate and the very tools you need to diagnose the problem aren't available or are degraded at the time they're needed.

[plug] the systems my team runs don't use ntl's public DNS servers, so I practice what I preach.

Originally Posted by Keyser

total BS. The ntl's DNS failed, so I changed to multiple others. nslookup's worked fine, but the sites were still totally unreachable.

Sorry Keyser, I'm not sure what you are saying is here, do you mean you think NTL's dns did fail or didn't fail ?

The link loss would certainly have had a detremental effect on them as lots of lookups would start to build up and eventually time out due to not being able to contact name servers across 'the pond'. This would also massivly increase the traffic on them as after each timeout the servers would try again [several times].

[KenK]

Originally Posted by pem

Sorry Keyser, I'm not sure what you are saying is here, do you mean you think NTL's dns did fail or didn't fail ?

The link loss would certainly have had a detremental effect on them as lots of lookups would start to build up and eventually time out due to not being able to contact name servers across 'the pond'. This would also massivly increase the traffic on them as after each timeout the servers would try again [several times].

Like Keyser, I realised that ntl's DNS were not answering, so I switched to different DNS addresses. That managed to get access to email (including a non-ntl site) but I still could not get anywhere with a web browser. nslookup, ping and tracert worked fine (e.g. to www.google.co.uk), but IE just kept timing out. I wondered about proxy and cache servers being down/swamped as well? Thank goodness for Tiscali dial-up.

[Frank]

Originally Posted by pem

Sorry Keyser, I'm not sure what you are saying is here, do you mean you think NTL's dns did fail or didn't fail ?

I have no idea pem - they didn't appear to work for me on the night.

What I am saying is that the ntl spokewoman was lying. she said that "users were unable to log onto Web sites using their host name, even though the sites were reachable to users who knew their IP address". Which I totally disagree with, as valid IP lookups were being returned from other ISP DNS servers, yet all sites were still unreachable on my ntl connection.

[Richardr]

Originally Posted by Keyser

What I am saying is that the ntl spokewoman was lying. she said that "users were unable to log onto Web sites using their host name, even though the sites were reachable to users who knew their IP address". Which I totally disagree with, as valid IP lookups were being returned from other ISP DNS servers, yet all sites were still unreachable on my ntl connection.

Certainly for me changing the dns servers worked fine.

The standard settings gave me no internet access.

Changing the DNS servers (to in my case the Easynet ones) gave me full access via the ntl broadband connection.

This included US sites.

Originally Posted by Keyser

What I am saying is that the ntl spokewoman was lying. she said that "users were unable to log onto Web sites using their host name, even though the sites were reachable to users who knew their IP address". Which I totally disagree with, as valid IP lookups were being returned from other ISP DNS servers, yet all sites were still unreachable on my ntl connection.

Ah right, then I totally agree, many sites were dead to me (such as google) even if you put in the IP.

[Florence]

Using mozilla I seemed to manage to get to most sites I wanted and the important ones this and the one I moderate on worked well..
My son using the same connection and IE failed to get to most of his websites.

[allanprg]

When NTL DNS servers went down I put the easynet DNS servers in as advised by several persons on NThellworld. No trouble after that. Internet worked fine and also email. NTL customer services stated that the fault was to do with the undersea cable being down. But I think it might be more down to NTL. Although other ISP's were having trouble as well. So I expect it was partly to do with this. But more to do with NTL.

[lincsat]

Found this on Neowin.com:

A denial of service attack on security website Zonelabs has been blamed for major disruption of the Internet over the past couple of days.

According to an anonymous NTL employee's posting on www.frogger.uklinux.net, the DoS attack was launched from 'someone in Eastern Europe': 'NTL was used as a stepping-stone from which an attack on Zonelabs was launched. BT and Pipex were also affected, although not as badly, it would appear.'

We reported yesterday that Telewest's Blueyonder services were being hit by what the company claimed was a network fault. It was later suspected that a damaged undersea transatlantic cable was to blame, but this does not appear to have been the case.

In fact, what occurred seems to be the latest in a series of DoS attacks designed to extort 'protection money' from website owners. Earlier this month we reported that, 'The people behind the attacks demand thousands of pounds to "guarantee" that such attacks won't happen again.

'Understandably, most companies whose website have been subject to DoS attacks are reluctant to come forward as they feel it might damage their businesses. According to the FT, though, a number of US-based gambling sites were among the first targeted but now the problem is becoming a worldwide one.'

The anonymous NTL employee concurs. 'This is the latest in a string of similar attacks originating from the same area,' he said. 'Usually the attacker demands a ransom to ensure that there will be no other attacks. Apparently many companies pay up immediately, rather than risk a loss of revenue incurred when their website (often their main source of income) goes down.