Mícheál Ó Foghlú's Weblog

The Great GoogleLapse

The Great GoogleLapse: Security to the Core | Arbor Networks Security This post has an excellent graph of the recent network outage caused by a routing error for some users of Google services. One explanation I read has linked this to an IPv6 upgrade in Google. This is an interesting event for a number of reasons:

• It reminds us that even the best managed Internet services can have problems, and that there is a serious risk in trusting your IT requirements to external services on the network. This is wake up call for those overly enthusiastic about cloud computing in particular and software services in general.
• Despite this, the outage was relative short, less than two hours, which is a lot better than the speed with which my own organisation could expect to solve a technical problem. But then we don't have the same requirements as many large enterprises would.
• It is interesting that IPv6 was one of the culprits. It is often blamed for network problems at present, partly because peope don't know enough to rule it out, and partly because it does sometimes lead to some strange problems (c.f. Geoff Huston's blog post of web client issues linked to IPv6 for an example of some real issues with IPv6).