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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: More on Moscow power failure( was RE: Moscow: global power outage)
The Russian media have lots of details about the power outage, but the general media hardly mentions the fact that there was a disruption of Internet service. The MSK-IX web page still has no news about the incident and no explanation as to why they shut down. Here is one Russian article that covers the shutdown http://www.webplanet.ru/news/internet/2005/5/25/shit_happens.html but they are scratching their heads as well. They say it is completely incomprehensible why MSK-IX was shut down because there should have been a reserve generator system in place. According to them, during normal times 80% of Russian Internet traffic passes through MSK-IX. Traffic did get rerouted to alternate international routes, however they became clogged up because the major international routes all rely on MSK-IX. Major Russian websites maintained power at their own data centres but that didn't help when most of their traffic goes through MSK-IX. The article summarizes by saying that the chief problem today is that there is not alternative internet exchange in Moscow and that means that it is easy to cut off Moscow from the Internet, even easier than one might have thought it would be. To that, I would add that Russia's entire telecomms infrastructure is still too highly centralized on Moscow. Even in a small country like England, we are moving away from centralizing everything through the capital city. Yet another lesson in how a single-point-of-failure is just plain bad design which *WILL* bite somebody in the end. --Michael Dillon
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