Beginning at 8:44 UTC (4:44am EDT) on July 8, 2022, Canadian telecommunications giant Rogers Communications suffered a catastrophic outage taking down nearly all services for its 11 million customers in what is arguably the largest internet outage in Canadian history. Internet services began to return after 15 hours of downtime and were still being restored throughout the following day.
Kentik Synthetics is all about proactively testing and monitoring specific elements of your network, the services it relies on, and the applications it delivers. That means using artificial traffic instead of end-user traffic to test a variety of aspects of digital experience monitoring like device availability, DNS activity, web application page load times, and BGP activity. But to test an end-user’s experience interacting with a website, we need to approach things differently.
In our quest to provide the leading network observability solution, Kentik has been focused on developing a service for NetOps teams that empowers them to have intimate knowledge of their network traffic and the devices that route traffic. Our service helps them plan capacity, project costs, optimize routes, detect unwanted traffic, troubleshoot issues and analyze events.
It was really great to see so many old friends again at Cisco Live this year in Las Vegas. It’s been a few years since I’ve been to a conference other than a few small work events, so it was exciting to wander the World of Solutions, talk to people at the many booths, and bump into people I knew online but never met in person.
On Tuesday, June 7, internet users in numerous countries from East Africa to the Middle East to South Asia experienced an hours-long degradation in service due to an outage at one of the internet’s most critical chokepoints: Egypt. Beginning at approximately 12:25 UTC, multiple submarine cables connecting Europe and Asia experienced outages lasting over four hours. As I show below, the impacts were visible in various types of internet measurement data to the affected countries.
