[lemiffe]

I had this earlier! A bunch of sites were down for me, I couldn't even connect to this site.

The problem is I don't know where to find what was going on (tried looking up live DDOS-tracking websites, "is it down or is it just me" websites, etc. I couldn't find a single place talking about this.

Is there a source where you can get instant information on Level3 / global DNS / major outages?

[kitteh]

Ddos tracking sites are eye candy and garbage. Stop using them.

Outages and nanog lists are your best bet, short of being on the right IRC channels.

[xwdv]

What are the right IRC channels?

[dudus]

I believe these are mostly non public channels where backbone and network infrastructure engineers from different companies congregate to discuss outages like this.

[kitteh]

Not just discuss, but fix too :)

[rolph]

also channels where hats of various type discuss advantages opportunities and challenges presented by such outages

[xwdv]

Which channels

[ficklepickle]

They wouldn't be non-public if they told us plebs

[rolph]

it isnt so much the channels that you want its the current IP of a non indexed IRC server[s] that you need, of course you could create and maintain your own dynamic IRC server and invite people that you trust or feel kinship toward.

here are a couple of "for instance" breadcrumbs for you to start from:

https://github.com/saileshmittal/nodejs-irc-server

https://ubuntu.com/tutorials/irc-server

...>>> https://github.com/inspircd/inspircd/releases/tag/v3.7.0

[danmg]

packetheads irc

[pseudoramble]

I agree!

I'm definitely an amateur when it comes to networking stuff. At the time, the _only_ issue I had was with all of my Digital Ocean droplets. It was confusing because I was able to get to them through my LTE connection and not able to through my home ISP. I opened a ticket with DO worried that it was my ISP blocking IP addresses suddenly. It turned out to be this outage, but it was very specific. Traceroute gave some clues, but again I'm amateur and I couldn't tell what was happening after a certain point.

So yeah, I too would love a really easy to use page that could show outages like this. It would be really great to be able to specify vendors used to really piece the puzzle together.

[manceraio]

I had a similar issue with my droplets as well. I thought I messed up something and then suddenly it worked again.

[jrockway]

I found places talking about this earlier. A friend of mine who has CenturyLink as their ISP complained to me that Twitch and Reddit weren't working. But they worked for me, so I suspected a CDN issue. I did some digging to figure out what CDNs they had in common. I expected Twitch to be on CloudFront, but their CDN doesn't serve CloudFront headers; instead they are "Via: 1.1 varnish". Reddit is exactly the same. I did some googling and found out that they both apparently used Fastly, at least to some extent. Fastly has a status page and it was talking about "widespread disruption".

So I guess my takeaway from this is that if the Internet seems to be down, usually the CDN providers notice. I don't know if either of the sites actually still use Fastly (I kind of forgot they existed), but I did end up reading about the Internet being broken at some scale larger than "your friend's cable modem is broken", so that was helpful.

It would be nice if we had a map of popular sites and which CDN they use, so we can collect a sampling of what's up and what's down and figure out which CDN is broken. Though in this case, it wasn't really the CDN's fault. Just collateral damage.