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Ask HN: Is Google Compute down?

174 points by hellcow ↗ HN
I'm not able to ssh into any of my boxes or access any of the sites, yet my status monitor isn't showing downtime. Spotify is also down for me, which is another GCP customer.

I'm in Los Angeles but the servers are hosted on us-central1

79 comments

[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 134 ms ] thread
ntq
We are able to connect to some of our services via LTE but not a local wifi network
ntq
Seeing the same China routes as mentioned on this thread
syogi
I'm in Los Angeles and I can access my GCP Console but I can't access Google services like google.com or Maps or Gmail.

EDIT: Some services are intermittently responsive. I had ~5 minutes of no access to anything. Some are slowly coming back.

dickfickling
yeah, GCP is having a serious outage. Our site is down, so's Pivotal Tracker

Edit: We're also in Los Angeles, connecting to us-central1. Seems to be a pattern?

hellcow
Bugsnag's app.bugsnag.com is down as well.
TodayIsTheDay
Does anybody else have chinatelecom-gw.transtelecom.net [217.150.59.249] in the traceroute for www.google.com
kacy
Also showing up on a traceroute to spotify.com for me.
leetbulb
Gitlab.com as well, earlier.

17 195.219.156.146 (195.219.156.146) 152.490 ms 152.423 ms *

18 * * mskn17ra-lo1.transtelecom.net (217.150.55.21) 198.658 ms

19 * * Google-gw.transtelecom.net (217.150.44.9) 192.230 ms

20 * * 108.170.250.111 (108.170.250.111) 172.086 ms

regnerba
Google IPs seem to be being routed to China for us.

We have servers in San Jose that cannot access Google services. Trace route shows everything going to China when leaving the San Jose data center. We can access the same services from Vancouver just fine.

lostmsu
Seems like its time to start or accelerate a working group on secure BGP.
regnerba
It's always great to go to your boss/CEO, explain what's going on, and then have to say "no, there is nothing we can do about it."
docker_up
How many times does this have to happen before China's privileges to do things like this get revoked? At this point, it can't be just a mistake and must be some state-sponsored hacking. Seems like a great way to find out where a particular Spotify user's IP address is.
QML
What are you going to do? Divide the internet in half? I say that in a joking way but it’s a possibility.
LinuxBender
There is already a wall. This may be a case of something leaking through it.
tinus_hn
You don’t need to cut the internet in half to limit China to routing IP adresses that are allocated to China.
QML
IIRC, Google can try to dictate a BGP policy that says not to accept any routes that goes through China. However, without any verification checks (via cryptography), an entity can lie about the path that they are advertising.
tinus_hn
No, the peers just outside of China can choose to reject advertisements of Google by China. Google can’t do much.
est
> China's privileges to do things like this get revoked

By revoking China's privileges, you reinventing the Great Firewall. Or at least part of how it works, by "revoking routing privilege of selected IP ranges."

You know what, that's the narrative of China's wall building proposal in the place. To end USA's "Internet supremacy" and to advocate "Internet sovereignty".

davismwfl
I am on the East Coast, in Florida and seeing the same thing with traffic heading to China, lots of "chinatelecom-gw.transtelecom.net" in traceroutes I have never seen prior.
scrollbar
Getting this as well in SF. transtelecom.net WHOIS says they're Moscow-based
davismwfl
Yea, just saw that same thing.

Definitely something interesting going on, and I am sure no shortage of some frantic research and effort to resolve this all at Google and such right now.

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fxdoublecute
we manage services deployed in every GCE region, and our monitoring in London is reporting every GCE region having intermittent connectivity. no problems with our services in the other major clouds (we use basically all of them)
jamalex
Same thing here in San Diego. Traceroute to spotify.com going through LA, San Jose, NY, London, Amsterdam, Frankfurk, "mskn17ra-lo1.transtelecom.net", then ChinaTelecom-gw.transtelecom.net.
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vamos_davai
I have trouble accessing YouTube. I live in Sherman Oaks (a town of Los Angeles).
sethvargo
Hi all - Seth from Google here. Our team is aware and we are working on mitigation. In short, a third party telco provider is advertising on one of our IP blocks. Unfortunately that's all the information I can share at this time.
fxdoublecute
thanks for the update! FWIW we started noticing the connectivity problems around 2018-11-12 21:17 UTC
sethvargo
Thanks for the info. We have reports showing it started a bit earlier than that, but every piece of information is helping in managing an incident. I'll make sure the team is aware.
konschubert
EDIT: This is a general statement, I am not complaining to google here.

This kind of thing should not be possible. Are there any protocol proposals or other kind of upgrades to the routing protocols that would prevent these kind of mistakes/attacks?

cm2187
I am surprised how fragile is the internet given how our society is increasingly becoming critically reliant on it.
QML
The internet was not really built with security in mind. Look at DNSSEC or BGPSEC.
zzzcpan
On the other hand it's not that fragile everywhere and for everyone. When ISP markets are not monopolized and the service doesn't rely on a big cloud - much fewer users will get rerouted through random countries and the service itself can failover to properly working datacenters, tolerating all those BGP misdesigns.

It's if the internet doesn't like all that centralization with all that market domination. It's naturally resilient only when there is a lot of competition.

viraptor
Check out BGPSec and RPKI - they should prevent issues like this one. They're not widely implemented/enforced. Maybe it's going to change though now that it looks like we've got a "misconfiguration" somewhere every month or so.
neuromantik8086
Resource Public Key Infrastructure, but ISPs are too cheap to actually implement it.
raesene9
yeah there's been proposals on improving BGP security for at least 14 years that I've been aware of :)

Getting the big ISPs/Telcos to adopt them... that's another matter

[dead] draw_down
> This kind of thing should not be possible.

When reality conflicts with what you believe to be possible, it's time to reexamine your assumptions.

tinus_hn
There are a lot of proposals but the problem is quite difficult to begin with and also involves centralizing policy. And then the chosen protocol has to be implemented by parties that tend to move at a glacial pace.
garysahota93
I love that Google monitors this site. I really appreciate you reaching out and letting us know the current status!
jamalex
Despite the subdomain, the IP for ChinaTelecom-gw.transtelecom.net (217.150.59.249) seems to be based in Russia, as does the carrier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TransTelekom
sterlind
Seems likely to be TT's gateway to CT. New theory: TransTelecom brought up a new gateway to ChinaTelecom, which incorrectly gossiped all advertisements from ChinaTelecom. This caused a leak, since CT has bgp highjacking of Google IP ranges for the GFW within China, but ordinarily doesn't leak them outside the country. TransTelecom misconfigured the gateway to broadcast everything advertised by ChinaTelecom, bringing external traffic into the GFW.
gsibble
That's a pretty good theory.
londons_explore
I doubt the GFW uses BGP to route traffic to it.

It needs to filter traffic to any address, and wouldn't have specific google ranges configured.

cobookman
There's a current BGP prefix hijacking issue currently being mitigated.
RayHawk
I'm getting the same thing. Servers are in us-east1 and tracert is ending at chinatelecom-gw.transtelecom.net [217.150.59.249]
aviv
Funny, a day after I posted this...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18429099

Is our first time actually rolling over the entire stack to AWS - and it worked!

GCP outage currently is massive, can't even use other regions.

Edit: This also affected AWS Oregon region earlier. I do not know how yet, but they too were unreachable briefly. Seems to be okay now.

jetforme
I'm in LA and seeing similar routing through chinatelecom-gw.transtelecom.net
CydeWeys
We urgently need a solution for routing traffic to IP addresses that is better than BGP.
dasm
Agreed. This appears to be a repeat of the attack covered here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18385920

I'm not familiar with BGP routing attacks; the article above seems to imply the attacker needs to compromise certs in order to glean useful data from the attack.

If that's accurate, is this Google-oriented traffic vulnerable to this type of attack?

raesene9
for Google traffic, assuming certificate pinning is in place, I can't see this being that successful.

However for more general traffic, well look at the trusted root list in your browser/OS. Realise that every single one of those trusted routes can issue certificates for a given domain...

dasm
Thanks. Since it appears all this traffic is Google-related, any guesses as to what the attacker could have gained here?
raesene9
This could just be a mistake of course, malicious intent isn't needed :)

Of the top of my head, assuming malicious intent, well not all browser (especially older ones) do certificate pinning, so perhaps then Chinese users of Google services using old browsers would find their traffic being intercepted?

Past that the leakage would seem fairly minor, a list of source IP addresses and destination hosts.

raesene9
or ISPs could implement the proposed BGP security standards... that have been proposed for , well a long time.
CydeWeys
Yeah, that'd be one possible solution. Point is it's not a solution yet because it isn't yet widely implemented, and may never be.
xolox
Reading through the comments here I'm recognizing "China Telecom" from an article on a BGP hijack that was published about a week ago, I still had the article open in my browser:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/11/stran...

In another comment in this thread I read:

> Seems like its time to start or accelerate a working group on secure BGP.

Indeed things can't go on like this for much longer...

faissaloo
I kept getting SSH bruteforce attempts from IPs on China Telecom a while back. Wonder what they're up to...
viraptor
These are botnets. You're going to get ssh bruteforce attempts from every country. I wouldn't read into it too much.
infogulch
So... what's the current state of a secure BGP? I feel like this in the top 3 security threats to the whole of the internet.
dejaime
Well, my instance seems to be working