Struggling to load Amazon or eBay in your web browser? HMRC or UK Government site not working for you? PayPal or Ticketmaster can’t complete a transaction? Don’t panic, it’s NOT your computer - it’s a colossal global error that has caused havoc with dozens of the world’s most popular websites.
Huge swathes of the internet have been thrown into chaos as dozens of the most popular websites have gone offline. From Amazon to eBay, Twitch.tv to Reddit, PayPal to Ticketmaster, and even Gov.uk and HMRC’s online resources – none of these sites are able to load. Major news websites, including The Guardian, Financial Times, and The New York Times have also gone dark due to the same error. Together, these sites attract millions of visitors every day. As it stands, millions of those users are being confronted with a series of error messages, including “connection failure” and “Error 503 Service Unavailable”.
There were problems this afternoon with search engines I use. Google, DuckDuckGo and Bing would not work at all. Having to go out I just shut the laptop down and on returning a few hours’ later tried it all again and everything was working. That could have been due to the internet going down or something else. All I do know is that it’s been alright since.
I didn’t have any problems - but maybe I wasn’t online at the time it happened. It shows (yet again) how dependent we have become on the internet for our lives and what chaos would ensue if it went down for any length of time.
You are right Pixie, with each new generation we become ever more reliant on the internet, not just for social media but communications, traffic management, energy and water supplies, logistics, Banks, the list is endless, and could we cope if it suddenly went down permanently. I always have kept a few quid in cash just incase, because imagine not being able to access your account…:shock:
As high street shops are closing by the score everyday in favour of shopping online, how long could we cope not buying everyday goods, and the few shops that were still open would be overwhelmed by tsunami of shoppers. Even most of the shops order their stock online…
As with all past inventions they sometimes go wrong, and occasionally with catastrophic results. The end of the internet could come from hackers, enemies, or natural extreme events. The taller we build our technological house of cards, the more precarious it becomes. I reckon it’s not a case of IF it goes t$ts up, more a case of when…
I really hope it doesn’t happen anytime soon, although I agree that its a case of when, not if. What concerns me most is the younger generation who have grown up not knowing anything else but “being online”. They don’t have the old school skills that we do, to fall back on.
That’s true Pixie, one of the reasons why I hope it happens sooner rather than later, while we are still here to teach our young to survive, otherwise they will be running around like headless chickens and anarchy with be the master…
I believe total and permanent failure is unlikely. If you take a look at the infrastructure of the Internet, it really is a clever place. If data can’t get through one way is has a choice of other routes to take. We might only be a couple of hundred miles apart but the route the data takes can be literally to the other side of the globe and back. Just all depends on the quickest route the data can find.
Not only that but the data may not also go the same route. It is split up into ‘packets’ and some packets could go one way and some another. All with digital addresses so that it knows where it’s heading. In the end it all joins up and we read our posts, get our emails and see out pictures.
The system could collapse entirely or be sabotaged completely but I think the infrastructure would prevent that. Never say never though.
As you write Mart, the internet really is a clever place. I was around when it all came about and understood it was a development by the Americans to ensure there would always be a way of communicating whatever happened in the world, especially in the ‘Cold War’ of those early days.
Then along came the worldwide web or www as most of us will know it nowadays. At that time due to a recession I was unemployed but thanks to a grant, from the EEC (now EU) of all places, I was able to learn how to build websites using HTML. That really was an eye-opener as to what could be achieved. HTML was developed further, the last one I knew about was XHTML I recall. A lot of this was then overtaken by software packages, Dreamweaver was one I recall, that used all the coding without the user having to type it all out. Interesting days those were.
Today the lengths technology has now gone to I find even more amazing. What can be achieved with today’s software developments is such a long, long way from those early days.
If anyone’s interested, below are links to websites giving information about this subject:
I wrote a site using something similar to Dreamweaver. It was called Namo WebEditor. I put a good number of pre-written Java applets in the site. Downloaded from a site that specialised in writing them. They could be worked into a page of HTML partly by copy/pasting them where needed and partly by adjusting position in the WYSYWIG interface on Namo. I fould I was writing some HTML code in the end.
Then I learned how people were mistrusting Java applets and support for them was being phased out in popular web browsers. I took out the applets and re-did the site in just HTML 4.01 and validated the code in W3C.org. Fonts were set by way of a stylesheet (.css file).
The site was hosted on the web space that a Virgin Media account holder could use. VM stopped that some years back and I never bothered to upload the site to anywhere else. All a bit dated now anyway.
For those who may be interested as to the reasons for yesterday’s failure of the internet for some websites in some instances:
[I]"A major internet blackout that hit many high-profile websites on Tuesday has been blamed on a software bug.
Fastly, the cloud-computing company responsible for the issues, said the bug had been triggered when one of its customers had changed their settings.
The outage has raised questions about relying on a handful of companies to run the vast infrastructure that underpins the internet."
[/I] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-57413224
Not the customers fault from the sound of it but doing something that caused some of the Internet to shut down must have been quite embarrassing nonetheless.
I had internet problems from last night, but reset router this morning. I used my phone’s mobile internet to stay online, and did antivirus etc, love eset
No need to apologise mart, I go off on one myself sometimes, I just wish I could understand it, and I know some members will be able to make sense of it, and this is the Technology thread…
One thing a bit funny in the post is ‘WYSIWYG’ (pronounced ‘wizzywig’). It might be thought some highly technical term but it literally stands for: What You See Is What You Get, which isn’t a very technical term at all is it?
It means a site can be built not by writing background code but by building and typing it as it would be seen in the finished page (more or less).
I did wonder at that when reading the news item. However, it was relevant so I posted the link.
With many website settings I have access to, as a customer, I am always changing something or other. Often that is necessary with things changing so regularly, as they seem to these days.
One of those websites which did ‘go down’ that day was my Gmail, others were search engines and also a couple of news websites. I always understood the whole internet couldn’t go down as that would go against the reasons why the internet first came into being. See my post 10 on this thread for more information on this.
Quite coincidentally that was the second time since 28 May that I was without broadband. Then, yesterday once again no internet. This time, according to my ISP, it was a similar problem to the first one on 28 May when there were problems with the green BT cabinet in the village. So now three times in 14 days, no internet!
It’s time BT Openreach was taken to task over the appalling condition of the telephone / broadband network in this country. Yes, BT Openreach is putting in fibre, it’s here just the other side of the road outside, as usual though they want yet more money to connect me to it. Why? Because broadband speeds would be higher! I don’t want higher speeds, just a reliable, reasonable service for which I already pay!
