For some reason half the internet seems to be down tonight. I can get to my own blog, to UZ's, to anything hosted on TypePad or Blogsome, and to BBC News, but not to Hotmail, Yahoo or Google. Which means I can't collect my email either, and my adverts weren't loading, which is why I've suspended them for the time being as they were stopping the rest of the page from loading. And some things stop loading at the last minute (as with anything at Blogspot). Strangely enough, I can't access my ISP's website either (bt.com, btyahoo.com, btinternet.com and btopenworld.com are all inaccessible), but I can access those bits of the internet that aren't down, or on the same side of this missing link as me. And the BBC has nothing on why three of the world's biggest websites are inaccessible.
Anyone got any ideas?
as-salaam alaikum,
Two things to check:
1. Can you ping the sites? This will determine if it is a network problem (no pings), a DNS problem (cannot resolve to IP address), or a problem with only HTTP traffic (which might suggest a problem with the BT transparent proxy server);
2. Can you access http://66.249.89.99 in your browser? This is the IP address for one of the Google nodes. If it works, but www.google.com does not, then it would suggest a problem with your DNS server.
Amir
Salaam;
I don't know about any of the other sites, but Blog*Spot had an announced outage scheduled for Friday night (for those of us in the Western Hemisphere), if I remember correctly, while they did maintenance -- last night's may have been more of the same. Blogger's presenting no problems this morning, alhumdillah. :)
As-Salaamu 'alaikum,
Amir: I tried traceroute on one or two of the sites I couldn't access, and the trace stopped after three or four sites. The weird thing about last night's mass outage is that it affected sites both here and in the USA, and affected my ISP's website but not my internet connection. That's what led me to think it was a DOS attack or something like that. Would such a large number of the world's major internet sites all be closed on the same day?
And no, I wasn't aware of the Blogspot maintenance, but unless you use Blogger regularly, you probably wouldn't. The funny thing with Blogger though is that it would load up and then stop just before displaying the page; I was never sure what was holding everything up.
as-salaam alaikum,
It could be a DOS attack but it would have needed to be on such a massive scale that surely someone, such as http://www.theregister.co.uk/, would have reported it.
Did the traceroutes end within the BT network or did they end on external sites? If the former, then it would suggest that it was a routing problem within BT (that may well have just affected a subset of users), but if it was the latter then it could have been a problem with a downstream provider. Given that you said it ended after just three or four hops, then I think it would still be within the BT network.
In any case, if it happens again, then you could go to http://www.traceroute.org/#United%20Kingdom and use some of these traceroute services to see if you get the same thing from other sites in the UK. That would allow you to isolate the problem to BT or the broader internet.
w'salaam
Amir