The Verge Is DDoSing My Brain ⇥ theverge.com

Russell Brandom of The Verge has dutifully covered the internet crisis that never was. If you found the story via Facebook, you would have seen this headline:

There was a massive internet outage this weekend — here’s what happened.

In this context, “outage” apparently means something other than what’s in the dictionary. At least, that’s what the article explains:

The good news is that the web is built on redundancy, so the extra terabit-per-second of bandwidth could be spread across the network without any catastrophic failures, but the wake-up call for telecoms is real.

Translation: no outage.

will-h in the comments is apparently Will Hargrave of LONAP:

The graph you show is a classic ‘monitoring outage’ – i.e. the attack affected the monitoring infrastructure of the IX, not the IX itself.

I advise several LINX members on network operations and none saw a decrease in traffic. There are operators out there with over 200G of capacity onto LINX (yes, that is 20×10GE ports or 2×100G or similar) each who saw no traffic decrease.

This incident has generated a surprising number of headlines due to significant misunderstandings of what many of the cited metrics actually mean. I still think Gizmodo’s reporting is the most accurate and best-researched.