Massive Internet outage in SA

Danie_V said:
I remember only ten years ago we had our own internal skilled IT staff with on-prem hosting - e-mail, video conferencing, document storage, etc just carried on working.
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This scenario might very well be returning in the near future, or at least a hybrid version of it.

Just repatriated all 1TB of my OneDrive data this morning and am advising everyone else to only use the cloud as a secondary backup.

www.infoworld.com

Cloud repatriation: Why companies are leaving the cloud

Cloud is a good fit for modern applications, but most enterprise workloads aren’t exactly modern. Security problems and unmet expectations are sending companies packing.
www.infoworld.com www.infoworld.com
 
whats interesting is the internet is composed of a few links, that if taken out, in the right way, will make the entire world stop working instantly.
this was but a test of that, to show people how vulnerable we truly are.

we've built a house of cards here, even with Starlink and endless cables connecting africa to the world,
if somebody takes out the data centers in such a way that their loss affects the entire downstream centers, its a doomsday scenario

its all interdependent on each other, if a bad actor were to gain access into the underlying code, or into some sort of admin panel, they could cause havoc and nobody could do much to it.

worse still if it was a AI that learned those weaknesses and exploited them, locked out admin access, overwrote all the commands, and forced shutdown of big parts of the internet.

fire sale would be putting it bluntly.
 
Cius said:
One thing I am now sure of. If WW3 breaks out the internet will break down very fast, and then probably be fragmented behind different alliances.
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Russia did a simulation some years ago just to test what would happen if cut off from the wider internet.

www.businessinsider.com

Russia plans to disconnect the entire country from the internet to simulate an all-out cyberwar

It's part of the Kremlin's plan to make the country's internet independent so it would survive even if the rest of the world cut it off.
www.businessinsider.com www.businessinsider.com

I can imagine that in SA practically everything would be broken because so many different apis/services/etc are hosted in Europe or the US. I noticed that even Telkom has some servers that handle billing that are hosted by AWS in London.
 
pstation said:
Russia did a simulation some years ago just to test what would happen if cut off from the wider internet.

www.businessinsider.com

Russia plans to disconnect the entire country from the internet to simulate an all-out cyberwar

It's part of the Kremlin's plan to make the country's internet independent so it would survive even if the rest of the world cut it off.
www.businessinsider.com www.businessinsider.com

I can imagine that in SA practically everything would be broken because so many different apis/services/etc are hosted in Europe or the US. I noticed that even Telkom has some servers that handle billing that are hosted by AWS in London.
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Lol You should see the panic the investment industry has over the unreliable Eskom grid, WMC is working hard to make alternative connectivity. Just boggles my mind!
 
pstation said:
Russia did a simulation some years ago just to test what would happen if cut off from the wider internet.

www.businessinsider.com

Russia plans to disconnect the entire country from the internet to simulate an all-out cyberwar

It's part of the Kremlin's plan to make the country's internet independent so it would survive even if the rest of the world cut it off.
www.businessinsider.com www.businessinsider.com

I can imagine that in SA practically everything would be broken because so many different apis/services/etc are hosted in Europe or the US. I noticed that even Telkom has some servers that handle billing that are hosted by AWS in London.
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agreed, loss of the internet even big parts of it, would be bad,
Id imagine the internet itself would continue working, its designed to survive Nuclear war after all,

but all its higher functions, like cloud storage and other systems that depend on packets being able to instantly move data around very quickly,
were to fail, we would be back to the 90's here, and it would be bad,

worse would be a carrington solar storm like event, that simply knocks out power and all electronics forever.
it would be Mad max out there, people killing each other for a can of Peaches, gangs roaming the streets, raping and murder in the streets,
loss of life would be unimaginable, we thought Covid was bad, this will make Covid look like a Kindergarden.
 
Jet-Fighter7700 said:
agreed, loss of the internet even big parts of it, would be bad,
Id imagine the internet itself would continue working, its designed to survive Nuclear war after all,

but all its higher functions, like cloud storage and other systems that depend on packets being able to instantly move data around very quickly,
were to fail, we would be back to the 90's here, and it would be bad,

worse would be a carrington solar storm like event, that simply knocks out power and all electronics forever.
it would be Mad max out there, people killing each other for a can of Peaches, gangs roaming the streets, raping and murder in the streets,
loss of life would be unimaginable, we thought Covid was bad, this will make Covid look like a Kindergarden.
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These topics are covered in most DR documents across enterprise. You saw some of it play out today, yes things went down but being able to recover from 4 international links having serious issues in half a day is pretty good.
 
B-1 said:
These topics are covered in most DR documents across enterprise. You saw some of it play out today, yes things went down but being able to recover from 4 international links having serious issues in half a day is pretty good.
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still lots of room for improvement no?
as I mentioned, imagine this system ran a autonomous car, having it stop working would be bad, people would die, bad.

same with other things, remote surgery, imagine this happens when the doctor sitting in Kansas has your spleen in the Robots claw,
and the line goes down, what then?


so many things will be affected, that Blips are unacceptable, it needs to be even more autonomous, like LOTS more.

now lets dial it up to 11, solar storm hits, fries electricity supply to all these data centres for weeks and months on end,
generators and diesel will hold on for what, 2 weeks, 2 months, and thats assuming those Generators dont blow up or overheat or the diesel fuel used to run them keeps pumping,

thats assuming the deliveries keep flowing, and that assumes paying for 1000000 liters of Diesel with a CC will still be possible,
see what will happen, everything is interconnected to each other, here in SA were seeing a bit of this with Load shedding, but imagine this had to happen on a wider scale.

would it be so brilliant? I dont think so, it will go down the sh#tter and quickly, all it takes is remove a few lynchpins and everything falls apart.
 
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