Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
One day we will all regret not carrying our wallets. I dont carry mine anymore. It feels nice to not worry about losing it or having it pickpocketed. But one day I’ll regret it lmao.
A couple months ago my area had a huge credit outage which affected many businesses including the company I work for. I travel between locations with my IT job and was at a location about an hour away at the time. Luckily I had a twenty tucked away for an emergency so I could have enough gas to get back. The outage only lasted a few hours but I make sure I keep a twenty always tucked away now because I never normally carry cash.
 
Amazing how these billion dollar companies never even thought to build their own CDNs.
Why would or should airlines like Delta or Southwest build out their own CDN when that's not what their business is or their specialty?

These are the same airlines that have had to delay or cancel hundreds of flights almost every year due to repeated network problems of their own. You really think they'd do a better job than the CDN providers like Akamai, CloudFlare, Fastly, Google, Amazon, CacheFly, StackPath, etc.?




 
Last edited:
This world needs to reset the whole networking system. Shut the internet down and RESET it.

Affected websites:

  • PlayStation Network
  • HBO
  • Fidelity
  • UPS
  • Steam
  • Airbnb
  • LastPass
  • Discover
  • American Express
  • Chase
  • PNC
  • Salesforce
  • Mint
  • Capital One
  • Vanguard
  • Delta
  • Southwest Airlines
  • Newegg
  • and more…
 
  • Like
Reactions: NMBob
AirBNB is back up after being down for a while so I think restoration is happening.

The funny thing about the internet's majestic is that it's decentralized but when the top 100 websites have 99% of the traffic and most of them rely on one CDN or DNS provider, well.....
Most likely they just moved their traffic between other CDNs. I worked for Limelight which is another big CDN that delivers traffic for a good chunk of the Internet. We were usually not the only CDN a company had. We did business with just about everyone and the big tech players have 3 CDNs generally. Akamai has the largest network by pushing their edge devices into every single ISP, but their prices are terrible and their management technology is junk. That's why Fastly has blown up in the last 5+ years. Their speeds are impressive, their cost is better, and their API is really nice.
 
What exactly happens when a whole service like this goes down? I thought it was designed to have backups and redundancy .

AirBNB is back up after being down for a while so I think restoration is happening.

The funny thing about the internet's majestic is that it's decentralized but when the top 100 websites have 99% of the traffic and most of them rely on one CDN or DNS provider, well.....

Its not decentralyzed. I think there are about 4-8 main data center companies, if they go down basically the whole internet as we know it will go down. Plus I think domains names must be registered with ICANN, one issuer of domain names.

I heard once 40% of the internet works on AWS

They are one of the oldest if not the oldest CDN. They have way greater coverage than Fastly or even Cloudflair... but they are also old and you deal with them in the same manner that 80s businesses dealt with each other.

Whats the difference between a CDN and a data center? I know a CDN provides a copy of the data at a data center to a closer location to the user. Doesn't that make every CDN a data center too? You can buy a server for whatever use you want?!
 
Bizarre to see Amazon affected. I would've thought with AWS they'd host on their own servers/CDN's.

I also thought Apple hosted their own servers/CDN's.
Apple has their own servers in several datacenters around the world plus they rely heavily on cloud storage in several different clouds and a good number of CDNs. There may be an advantage to them eventually building out a CDN as they deliver more and more video content. That's what Netflix did when they left Limelight years ago. They built out a really big network slowly, but it's a lot of costly work. It requires a large amount of software development as well as rolling out tens of thousands of servers to ISPs around the world, which you then get to manage. There's a lot to be said for recognizing your core competencies as a business and just paying someone else to do that even if it costs more.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Stryder541
“According to Apple's System Status page, iCloudBackup, ‌iCloud‌ Mail, ‌iCloud‌ Storage Upgrades, and Photos are experiencing issues that could be related to the outage.”

I think Apple’s problem is due to me trying to add my 101st iCloud Hide My Email account in the Beta phase.

Was kind of surprised there is a limit on this. If you can’t give a unique email to each website, it’s gonna punch a hole into the bottom of Apple’s no fingerprinting initiative.
 
They seem to still work in 1999. Configuring it feels like I am filling out a forum to ask an office worker to manually adjust the servers for me.
Their co-founder died in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. They never recovered from a technology perspective and basically managed to stay in business with huge contracts they garnered during the initial dot-com boom. After that they just hired sales geniuses and engineers good enough to keep things limping along.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Morod
Whats the difference between a CDN and a data center? I know a CDN provides a copy of the data at a data center to a closer location to the user. Doesn't that make every CDN a data center too? You can buy a server for whatever use you want?!

If you look at a cloud provider like Amazon they have regions where they cluster dozens of data centers together to provide services. In the US that would be regions like US-east-1 , US-west-1, or US-west-2 (go Oregon). As a business, you're putting your systems in one or more (hopefully more) of those regions. The problem is those regions aren't right where your customers are. When you stream content on iTunes there's certainly a good amount of API calls that happen there to authorize you, to see what songs are available, to toss ratings data, etc etc and those will come from Apple's systems. There's no need for Apple to actually give you the song though from their Oregon datacenter if you live in say Florida. You want that content to be really close to you to prevent latency and jitter as you stream it. The CDN sources the original content and distributes it to tens of thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of servers globally to get that content super close to you. If you're a Comcast customer every city has Akamai gear and Netflix gear (they run their own CDN) in it. Other CDNs like Cloudflare, Limelight, or Fastly have collections of CDN servers in major metro areas then they peer fiber to the ISPs in those regions. The ISPs love CDNs because it means they don't have to backhaul that traffic over expensive fiber links. Sometimes it comes entirely from their head end. A great example of where something like a CDN really shines is software updates. When I worked at Limelight we distributed a lot of these for gaming consoles and some mobile devices that people here probably use. Say Apple releases iOS 15 tomorrow. They have that in their datacenter, but the various CDNs they use will distribute that around the world and going back to that Florida example 50,000 people in that city will download it from a series of Akamai nodes right in Comcast's equipment room. Never touches the greater Internet which makes it super fast.
 
Apple has their own servers in several datacenters around the world plus they rely heavily on cloud storage in several different clouds and a good number of CDNs. There may be an advantage to them eventually building out a CDN as they deliver more and more video content. That's what Netflix did when they left Limelight years ago. They built out a really big network slowly, but it's a lot of costly work. It requires a large amount of software development as well as rolling out tens of thousands of servers to ISPs around the world, which you then get to manage. There's a lot to be said for recognizing your core competencies as a business and just paying someone else to do that even if it costs more.
That does make sense for Apple, but Amazon and AWS? They are the biggest cloud service provider on the planet, it makes zero sense for Amazon to be contacting CDN's from a smaller quasi-competitor.
 
never heard of akamai

Akamai is a staple in the content delivery industry. I'm sure you've heard of more recent members of this industry, including Amazon CloudFront and Cloudflare, but Akamai goes back years before these newer players and their marketing efforts.

Isn't this Akamai's second big blip this year? They've been known for being extremely stable and transparent. Apple has used them for decades to deliver media.
 
  • Like
Reactions: B4U
That does make sense for Apple, but Amazon and AWS? They are the biggest cloud service provider on the planet, it makes zero sense for Amazon to be contacting CDN's from a smaller quasi-competitor.

One of the ways to make the internet, as a whole, more stable is to spread resource loading out over several providers. It makes perfect sense for Amazon to be using other CDNs in their setup, in case their have their own outage. What doesn't make sense is that there was no fallback when this outage occurred.
 
  • Like
Reactions: cjgrif
One day we will all regret not carrying our wallets. I dont carry mine anymore. It feels nice to not worry about losing it or having it pickpocketed. But one day I’ll regret it lmao.

When you use your phone or watch as a payment method, I don't believe it needs to have an internet or data connection. The device is the payment card.
 
What exactly happens when a whole service like this goes down? I thought it was designed to have backups and redundancy .



Its not decentralyzed. I think there are about 4-8 main data center companies, if they go down basically the whole internet as we know it will go down. Plus I think domains names must be registered with ICANN, one issuer of domain names.

I heard once 40% of the internet works on AWS



Whats the difference between a CDN and a data center? I know a CDN provides a copy of the data at a data center to a closer location to the user. Doesn't that make every CDN a data center too? You can buy a server for whatever use you want?!
You're making my point though. This was designed to be decentralized....or it CAN be decentralized but there's more profit in consolidation and capitalism gonna capitalize.

Akamai moves a very big part of the Internet around and when they go down, we suffer. AWS, Rackspace, Akamai, Limelight, Google, Azure or if ICANN screws up, it goes down.
 
  • Like
Reactions: MacBH928
I hope this doesn't become a regular occurrence? Bit of an issue when a few companies handle DNS for so many websites globally. And the world is now geared to be online.
Bet it was a buggy software patch.

Yup. Single Point of Failure. Bad design. I can understand smaller shops having this issue, but big companies should definitey have fallbacks in place.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Pezimak
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.