East Coast Internet Outage

283 points by taf2 ↗ HN
Anyone else noticing a widespread internet outage on the East Coast of the US?

264 comments

[ 5.9 ms ] story [ 254 ms ] thread
Yes, sites are loading very slowly, if at all. Thought it was AWS at first but Google services are having the same issue.
Yes, lots of issues connecting to various cloud services here in DC.
On Verizon FIOS here, perhaps this is another Verizon outage?
Experiencing it from Verizon ISP. Any others that are also experiencing this not on Verizon?
Yes x2--Verizon Fios in at least two different states.
yep, i'm in DC area and having issues across multiple sites. Fios Fiber here
Same thing here on the MD side on Fios.
Observing the same issue from various East Coast locations, all on Verizon Fios.
Same thing in NYC. on Verizon FiOS fiber
Spotify is loading weird for me (New England).
Verizon in NYC acting funny.
On Fios in Seattle. Seems good here.
FIOS Here in the Philadelphia area, having issues hitting AWS as well.
Looks like it's Verizon having trouble.
Yep, on verizon fios just outside baltimore. Can't ping 8.8.8.8, but can ping 1.1.1.1 fine. Also having issues connecting to services running in AWS.
(comment deleted)
Comcast seems to be fine (at around 11:50 a.m. EST), so maybe it's just Verizon.
I'm in Philly, and I'm having issues with Comcast.

Doesn't look like it's isolated to any one provider, or any one site. https://downdetector.com is showing many issues across many platforms.

(comment deleted)
boston fios here, having intermittent issues, mostly slow connection.
Verizon FiOS. 50% packet loss with many "good" packets in the hundreds of ms when pinging Google. NYC.
https://twitter.com/VerizonSupport/status/135410988957298278...

There is a fiber cut in Brooklyn. We have no ETR, as of yet. You can use the MY Fios app for updates. *EAG

Does a cut cable in BK account for outages up and down the east coast?
I'm not knowledgeable enough to answer that question. However, this is the only Twitter comment that mentions this on their page, and I don't have access to a Verizon account to verify their outage status memo. We had a flurry of employees saying their connections were going haywire to the business and this is the only thing I've been able to gather outside of downdetector.
This is speculation, of course, but: there are several large Internet Exchanges in NYC, and US/EU peering points. It's probable that a fiber cut could have cut several other links, and the failover links are now completely overwhelmed.
If it's a fiber that goes into major data centers it certainly could.
Verizon had (and apparently still has) a few vulnerable links in the NYC metro area that have wide ranging impacts.
Weird, I live in Brooklyn, I had no issues all day.
in northern Brooklyn with FiOS and I had issues ~11am-12pm
Ah, I'm in south Brooklyn, near Canarsie/Brownsville. I guess we were unaffected.
Issues with FiOS in the Boston area. Traceroute seems to point to an issue originating in NY but that's just speculation. Apparently a lot of other services are down. Might be a Tier 1 or 2 ISP.
Same here. Seeing heavy packet loss to most (but not all) sites that route through verizondigitalmedia.com.customer.alter.net in NYC.
My corporate laptop is affected. My roommate’s corporate laptop is totally unaffected. We’re on the same router/gateway.

Any theories out there to explain this phenomenon? Fascinating.

(My theory is a network partition, where my roommate’s IP addresses happen to be in regions that are on “our side” of the partition, whereas my IP Addresses are on the “other”, unreachable side).

Is your roommate on a VPN? It looks like Verizon is having trouble only with traffic to certain destinations (perhaps Google and AWS).
They’re not. I’m on a split VPN, for what it’s worth. Disconnecting even from the split VPN does not help my laptop.
Are you using different DNS servers? My work laptop was using 8.8.8.8 and is getting name resolution errors, but my personal computer is using 1.1.1.1 and working fine.
Interestingly enough, they’re both deferring DNS to our router, and the router is configured to use DNS servers dynamically provided by the ISP.
its most likely your companies RDP infrastructure (or local environment) operates on AWS. Which is down because of this "cut"
(comment deleted)
I didn't do any digging but it seems like once you have a connection established, it's not too bad. Is your roommate on a full-tunnel VPN?
They weren’t on a VPN, but my guess is that they got IP addresses from their DNS requests that were on our side of the partition.

In any case, it looks like it’s ended for us. The window for gathering evidence slides closed...

It’ll be interesting to read the post mortem on this one.

Thanks for the tip; connecting to a full-tunnel VPN seems to fix this for me. (FiOS in Brooklyn).
Apparently, Verizon's outage page doesn't actually say if there's an outage. You have to log in to see if there's an outage. Too bad logins are failing after ~10 minutes for me.

https://www.verizon.com/support/residential/service-outage

Yeah, I'm getting a 504 from their status site even after managing to get through the authn process.

Although my packet loss to my IPv6 tunnel provider just went to zero, so that's a good sign here (Manhattan).

Honestly, at this point I've found HN to be the best "Status Page" for this sort of thing. I came here first when I found issues and fiddling around with my custom DNS lookup hierarchy didn't help.

FiOS customer in DC Metro.

Except these posts seem to regularly get taken down or flagged. This isn't even on the front page anymore it seems.
I'm glad I'm not the only one noticing this. I could usually rely on HN to not be so heavily "filtered" for a lack of a better term but I have noticed the slide into a more controlled/gamed PR outlet.
It set off the flamewar detector. We monitor that list and eventually cancel the penalty for threads that aren't actual flamewars, but it takes a while. If anyone wants to make it faster, emailing hn@ycombinator.com is usually a forcing function.

Edit: Also, posts without URLs get a downweight by default. I've turned that off too, and merged the other threads into this one, since it was the first one.

How does one programmatically detect a flamewar? :)
By proxy, which is why there are false positives.
> How does one programmatically detect a flamewar? :)

An NLP/Machine learning model would be a great way! Probably also taking in other features as input such as the number of comments per second, and how deeply nested those comments are.

Let's build one!

> It set off the flamewar detector.

Why? There do not appear to have been any posts remotely resembling a flamewar in the comments.

downdetector.com did well today. Front page showed a generalized web issue, and any one of the individual services' status pages showed it was geographically localized to the midatlantic and northeast US.
It would be interesting if someone could automate something to pick out HN outage discussions and make an HN driven "downdetector" page.
Also checking /r/sysadmin and sorting by new
I am experiencing connectivity issues on Fios outside of Philadelphia in Pennsylvania.

edit: as of 13:20 (GMT-5) it appears to be resolved.