Verizon accused of knocking out the internet following IP address changes
US telecoms giant Verizon has been fingered as the inadvertent guilty party in a recent slowdown in services for some of the world’s biggest websites, after it meddled with groups of IP addresses, the unique identifying numbers for every device connected to the web.
Engineers opted to take these groups and move them into smaller units in aid to provide it with more addresses to play around with but the apparently inconsequential filing change had major repercussions for the wider web.
Within hours major websites such as eBay reported that their services had slowed or seized up altogether with many British users unable to log-in throughout much of the day.
The scare has left computer scientists scrabbling to understand how so innocuous a change could knock out significant chunks of the internet in this way, with many conceding that the jerry built ad-hoc nature of the internet at its most fundamental levels are to blame.
Dr Joss Wright, computer scientist at Oxford University, told the Telegraph: “There are relatively few experts in this. It really is the deep magic,” he says. But fundamentally the difficulty lies in the fact that no one planned and built the internet: it grew organically, like a weed. When problems arose, engineers found ways to patch them or work around them. But sometimes those fixes became problems themselves a few years later.”
Wright cites two key bottlenecks as the source of the trouble; the exhaustion of a limited number of IP addresses and router capacity – both of which are at or near their limits.