The Catch-22 that broke the Internet

The Catch-22 that broke the Internet

Jill T Frey
Biz & IT

Enlarge / The outage started shortly after 12pm on June 2nd, impacting global users connecting to GCP us-east4-c. (credit: ThousandEyes)

Earlier this week, the Internet had a conniption. In broad patches around the globe, YouTube sputtered. Shopify stores shut down. Snapchat blinked out. And millions of people couldn’t access their Gmail accounts. The disruptions all stemmed from Google Cloud, which suffered a prolonged outage—an outage which also prevented Google engineers from pushing a fix. And so, for an entire afternoon and into the night, the Internet was stuck in a crippling ouroboros: Google couldn’t fix its cloud, because Google’s cloud was broken.

The root cause of the outage, as Google explained this week, was fairly unremarkable. (And no, it wasn’t hackers.) At 2:45pm ET on Sunday, the company initiated what should have been a routine configuration change, a maintenance event intended for a few servers in

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BGP mishap sends European mobile traffic through China Telecom for 2 hours

BGP mishap sends European mobile traffic through China Telecom for 2 hours

Jill T Frey
BGP / Biz & IT / Border Gateway Protocol / China Telecom / Uncategorized

Enlarge / A graphical depiction of Thursday’s BGP leak. (credit: ThousandEyes)

Traffic destined for some of Europe’s biggest mobile providers was misdirected in a roundabout path through the Chinese-government-controlled China Telecom on Thursday, in some cases for more than two hours, an Internet-monitoring service reported. It’s the latest event to stoke concerns about the security of the Internet’s global routing system, known as the Border Gateway Protocol.

The incident started around 9:43am UTC on Thursday (2:43am California time). That’s when AS21217, the autonomous system belonging to Switzerland-based data center colocation company Safe Host, improperly updated its routers to advertise it was the proper path to reach what eventually would become more than 70,000 Internet routes comprising an estimated 368 million IP addresses. China Telecom’s AS4134, which struck a network peering arrangement with Safe Host in 2017, almost immediately echoed those routes rather than dropping them, as proper

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Time to Get That Nexus 6P Class Action Money, so Check Your Spam Folder

Time to Get That Nexus 6P Class Action Money, so Check Your Spam Folder

Jill T Frey
Google / Huawei / News / Nexus 6P


Back in April, we shared info from a class action lawsuit that had been brought against Google and Huawei over issues (bootlooping and battery drain) that plagued the Nexus 6P, the flagship phone the two released in partnership back in 2015. At the time, Google and Huawei had agreed to pay a settlement to owners of the phone up to $400 depending on the issues they experienced. Yesterday, owners of the Nexus 6P were given the opportunity to file a claim from the settlement.

Just to be clear, not everyone is entitled to $400 from this settlement. While the lawsuit does cover anyone who “purchased a Nexus 6P smartphone, other than for resale, between September 29, 2015 and May 3, 2019,” you’ll have to show documentation of issues to get anywhere near $400. The two issues included in this settlement are battery drain and bootlooping.

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Ars To-Be-Read: Our most anticipated books for the second half of 2019

Ars To-Be-Read: Our most anticipated books for the second half of 2019

Jill T Frey
ars tbr / book expo 2019 / books / fantasy / Fiction / Gaming & Culture / nonfiction / sci-fi

Enlarge (credit: Valentina Palladino)

Authors, publishers, and book nerds converge on New York City at the end of May each year for Book Expo America, and this year Ars was there to scope out some stories. The convention showcases books of all kinds—fiction, nonfiction, sci-fi, fantasy, historical fiction, YA, graphic novels, comics, and everything in between—making it an excellent opportunity to learn more about already anticipated titles and discover new releases debuting in the coming months.

After talking to numerous publishers and hearing a few authors speak (including Star Trek’s George Takei—check out the first pick in our list), we’re highlighting a few of our most anticipated reads for the rest of 2019. Most fit into the nonfiction, sci-fi, and fantasy genres, but some bleed into other genres as well. Add to your TBR list, e-reader, library app, or Audible wish list so you don’t miss any of these 

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