HN Explorer

Ask HN: Is there something wrong with internet right now?

166 points by leesalminen ↗ HN
Down Detector (http://downdetector.com/) is showing a huge spike in reports over the past 30 minutes. Many of our users are having trouble reaching our LB in Northern Virginia.

Anyone else having this issue or any insight as to what's going on?

77 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 155 ms ] thread
tomberek
Yes, 4.2.2.1 DNS is down. Probably your problem.
leesalminen
Thanks for the tip. I'll pass this along to our users.
mrtron
Google provides alternatives at 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4
Twisol
My local network has those as the default nameservers, and my laptop has them set manually as well. Still having problems.

Normally, ISP name resolution is the first thing I look at, but this seems atypical.

lima
Might as well be a symptom.
kordlessagain
Symptom of it being a primary cause would be no loading, then all of a sudden loading of site. However, I've had intermittent connection with HN, so not sure that is necessarily the primary. Edit: clearly spell check is down.
lexnay
I thought it was just me. I’m in Colorado. Bandwidth seems to be reporting as normal, however I’m having issues loading Facebook, imgur, some advertisements on reddit, etc.
leesalminen
I'm in Colorado as well! Glad to know it's not just me. Are you on CenturyLink or Comcast?
EvilMonkeyMat
I'm in the province of Quebec (Eastern Canada), and we're having huge problems with most websites. Strangely enough, LTE network is working on the three providers I've tried.
hi5eyes
Southern Ontario, everything is slow as all hell
gpm
Also Southern Ontario (Toronto), I've noticed nothing. Been or reddit, HN, many random programming websites, starcraft, etc.

I've checked all the urls people said they had problems with so far (spotify, cloudflare, downdetector) and haven't had any.

timsco
Are you on Rogers or Bell? I'm on Bell and it's slow. Also slow at Starbucks which is Bell...
hi5eyes
everything's back up for me
hi5eyes
everything's back up for me
epalm
Yep, in Mississauga (just west of Toronto) using Bell, most sites are slow or don't load at all. Can't see a pattern yet though.
hi5eyes
everything's back up for me
johndubchak
Oh no, the Internet Monopolies are instituting "Rolling Blackouts" ahead of the FCC decision on Net Neutrality!!
RobertDeNiro
Same here. I was going crazy trying to diagnose potential WiFi issues. Since LTE worked fine on my phone I assumed the culprit had to be the WiFi link.

Its really weird.

EvilMonkeyMat
Everything's back online now. It's been like 5 minutes.
pgroves
downdetector.com now seems to be down. never a good sign.
hi5eyes
facebook, discord, reddit; all unusable

what the hell?

preben
Sweden here. Facebook and other select sites down.
deadcast
Dang I can't even access downdetector. I'm in California in the central valley. Everything is very sluggish and the ol' router/modem reboot did nothing. :/
abarringer
yes, lots of sites offline for me. I'm in Atlanta GA.
jmcgough
I thought it was just me - was about to head to a cafe. On comcast here in Berkeley FWIW.
daxorid
None of the sites mentioned in this or other threads are down from the vantagepoint of Cox in Arizona.

Sounds like an ISP issue.

kordlessagain
More likely BGP or similar border gateway routing things. In some cases, gateways can become overloaded because of bad destination routes that other gateways are routing correctly. Not that I'm an expert at this stuff. I'm not.
JonathonW
Comcast Business in Nashville is terrible right now for anything that's not local (Facebook, Reddit, etc.). Some are worse than others (HN is just slow; Reddit's very slow but loads eventually; Down Detector won't load at all on our work connection now).

AT&T (in Nashville) doesn't seem to be impacted; I'm RDP'd into one of my home machines with Uverse and everything's working great there.

nijaru
I’m in the SF area and Comcast is between slow and not working. Cellular data is working fine though
dageshi
No problems reaching any site from the UK
kurtdac
Spotify has been down for me since ~1:00 EST in Toronto.
Twisol
I'm having significant issues as well -- it happened quite suddenly an hour ago (9:50 Pacific Time, northern California). Thought it was a local issue at first and spent the last hour debugging my network. I think my apartment is on Comcast, although I'm not 100% certain (one of my roommates is in charge of it).

Spamming `date` at an affected SSH connection suggests it's entirely a download problem, since all of the timestamps are very close, but they're received multiple seconds apart.

Like some other commenters here, my mobile connectivity is just fine.

EDIT: Certain sites (including Hacker News) are now qualitatively more accessible, and I'm now hitting expected speeds at http://testmy.net/download. SSH to my DigitalOcean is also better. Here's hoping everything else smoothes out soon!

Stratoscope
Same here on Comcast in Menlo Park (CA). T-Mobile is zippy, though, so I guess I'll switch to mobile hotspot for a while.
Fwirt
Salem, Oregon here. Everything is zippy. Seems like it's location dependent? Just checked reddit and facebook.
24gttghh
I was just thinking, shouldn't there/couldn't there be a site that aggregates actual statistics (as opposed to the crowd-sourced DownDetector) regarding internet connectivity/health globally to provide an accurate snapshot of what might actually be happening?

Edit:

Sorta like this[0] I suppose.

[0]https://www.akamai.com/us/en/solutions/intelligent-platform/...

oasisbob
For many years there was a site called the Internet Health Report which would show packet loss and problems between multiple carriers. It was pretty useful until Dynatrace deep-sixed it this year.

I haven't found a suitable replacement, would be interested to hear any suggestions.

mattbeckman
Yeah, I just headed there for the first time in a while.

DISAPPOINTED.

bproven
Issues here in San Jose area - it appears to be Comcast from what I can tell. Same as others, cellular via ATT is fine.
zelon88
IT worker here... Everything is on fire and my phone is ringing like crazy.
[dead] monistowl
Does that differ in any significant respect from a normal day in IT?
chipuni
I'm a Comcast user in Hayward (Bay Area), CA, USA.

Some sites are easily available: Google, Yahoo.

Some sites are partially available: Twitter, Hacker News.

Many sites are completely unavailable: Down Detector.

manyxcxi
I was having maddening issues with Comcast Business in Portland, OR this morning.

Switched over to my VPN and haven’t had any problems since.

My initial pokes at the issues I was seeing were DNS related, but even switching the DNS hosts to Google or OpenDNS didn’t completely fix it. Maybe they’ve got some deep packet inspection issues?