Is the internet down?

[Ofnuts]

Is it me or are there general internet problems today? I have had problems accessing Reddit, StackOverflow, Gimp.org, and some others. Doesn't look like my own internet (mostly errors from the servers themselves, and doesn't work either on my work PC which  only sees the internet through a heavily filtered VPN...).

[Ottia Tuota]

(06-08-2021, 11:12 AM)Ofnuts Wrote: Is it me or are there general internet problems today? I have had problems accessing Reddit, StackOverflow, Gimp.org, and some others. Doesn't look like my own internet (mostly errors from the servers themselves, and doesn't work either on my work PC which  only sees the internet through a heavily filtered VPN...).

I can access those you mentioned. Haven't seen any problems.

[Ofnuts]

Actually a known outage with fastly, a CDN...

[rickk]

Kinda puts a new perspective on the concept of "too big to fail", doesn't it?

I believe the problem was largely resolved by the time the western hemisphere was awakening.

[rickk]

I wonder if today's problems were related to Amazon's roll out of it's new "Sidewalk" functionality this morning?
AFTER MONTHS OF testing and delays, Amazon announced last Friday that it would finally launch Amazon Sidewalk on June 8

https://www.wired.com/story/how-amazon-sidewalk-works/

[Ofnuts]

Not likely. This concept is quite old and has been used by "Free", a French ISP that entered the mobile market (and possibly a second ISP). Well before going mobile, their modem/routers (what we call a "box" in French) had a side SSID that was open to all Free customers in the vicinity. You could use that on vacations (or as a backup if you own line was down). Of course you could turn it off in your router but then you lost the possibility to connect to others.

After a few years they entered the mobile market, but since they didn't have many antennas and had to rent the bandwidth from other established networks, they re-used this side channel to connect phones. In dense cities like Paris this worked quite well (but you needed a phone that could support this, which meant mostly an iPhone at the time).

[rich2005]

Same here in the UK, The ISP I use VirginMedia, possibly the worst in the world. has a similar set-up. They provide the 'box' , a modem / wireless/-router which can be shared by other (roaming) VM users. Fortunately, this can be turned off, back to a modem only mode (and connected to your own wireless router). The worrying part is, a VM technician can go in at any time and change the settings back.