 So, today is November 7th, 2017, and on 11th, 6th, 2017, the internet broke. And a lot of you may have noticed this if you happen to live in the US and you happen to be using Comcast or any other services that relied on Level 3's networks. So the internet went kind of down, or at least went really slow for people and some sites were not accessible. And I want to talk about what actually happened. So, in a terrible, awful headline font, Wired Magazine says how a tiny air shut off the internet for parts of the US, and it's talking about Level 3's communications and a misconfiguration of what they call a route leak. And so I want to talk about what that actually meant and give you some visual aids to help you understand the size and scope of the internet and exactly what went wrong. So first, we'll start with something really simple here. When you go to a website, and we're going to use my website, laurancesystems.com, I'm going to do TracePath, and what I'm doing is showing you the different hops. So these are devices local in my network, firewalls that I have. And then this is onto the Comcast network. So we're seeing, you know, the IP address or names of these. So I go from Michigan Comcast and Southgate, where I'm located, Pontiac, and so on and so forth, jumping through networks until we finally land on my website here at the bottom, which is the final hop. So there are 13 spots in between me and my website. So to you, when you go to a website, you see it directly connecting. The reality is you hop across a bunch of networks. And that's what the internet really is, not just a bunch of connected computers, but also a series of connected networks. Now what went wrong? Border gateway protocol, and I'll leave a link to the Wikipedia article so you can get some details if you wanted to expand further on it, but our BGP for short, is the gateway protocol that connects all these individual networks together. Because the internet being all these individual networks, BGP is the map for those individual networks. And it's big. It's really big. And how big is it? Well, that's what I wanted to show you here. So here's a tool someone created to visualize. And I'll leave a link below this website, what the BGP looks like, and how the automated system's routing works. So this BGP is that map of all the networks. Here's what all the networks. And they're just kind of a blob because there's so many of them. You have to zoom in pretty far and start seeing all the interconnects between them. So it's a lot of networks. And this is an individual computer. That map would be much, much bigger. These are the network connections. So we know which network is where. And that's what BGP defines that this is on this network and that's on that network. And once it gets to that network, that's when the final routing to get you to actually the computer that you want to get to works. So a mistake was made at level three internet. And when level three communications made a mistake, that breaks a lot of things. And let's talk about who they are. Outside of the tech world, you may not have heard of level three. But when we zoom in and out a little bit here, as it takes a while to draw these, you'll notice a couple gaps, some holes, because it takes a while to render them. That's level three communications. And they are big, AT&T might have heard of them and some of these other companies. But when we start looking at level three and how big their interconnect is, this, by clicking this, it allowed me to filter to what level three connects to. A large portion of the internet is level three's networks. So when they made a mistake at this level, it breaks all the ancillary things attached to it and everything touching it. So this is kind of what went wrong. And this is kind of how fragile the internet is. While it's robust and can survive a single network failure, because it'll reroute around it, that information is held in the BGP tables. If those BGP tables are wrong, the internet ends up routing things wrong. And when things get routed wrong, we can't get to websites and things go down. The route mistake they made directly affected the way Comcast routing works, because Comcast passes through some of level three's networks to get to other sites. So when they made a mistake at level three, Comcast, because it crosses across that network, had the wrong routing information that was typed in and therefore the internet breaks. So literally a human making a typo is still the basis for some major things that happen. Now, I'm sure there's a lot of protocols in place. They're supposed to keep this from happening. So I'd love, hopefully, level three gives a good debrief on the details of what happened. And that would be wonderful, having a good public disclosure about how the oops occurred, and you shut down part of the US internet for two hours, showing our reliance on the internet is pretty outstanding. It would be great to see all the details and know what happened and how's it not going to happen again, because that's what we really want to know. Two hours of no internet, it's a big deal for people who work from home, trying to get things done. It created some delays for us, because we were in the middle of doing things, and temporarily we lost the ability to do remote support for a little while, which good thing is nothing super critical was happening at that moment. But obviously, what a pain. And so the internet has become so critical to us, we really want to know what happened. But so this is kind of a fun tool to play around with and kind of gives you an idea for how things are connected. But it's really interesting and it's also scary and fragile at the same time. So it's just a fascinating look at the whole thing. But hopefully this is a little bit helpful to give you an idea of what happened yesterday, what went wrong. It's also maybe an insight into just how big and the internet is. This is just a visualization of the networks, not even all the computers on it and the complexities of this. So we will probably still see things happen in the future. No need to panic. But the other side of it is this system is definitely a marvel of human engineering at the same time. The internet is probably one of the most amazing, complicated machines ever created. So that's also why human error can play such a hard role in it. Anyways, if you found this interesting, if you like the content here, like and subscribe. Hopefully this kind of tells you how the internet broke and gives you a little bit of insight into it. And then it actually wasn't kind of guessed this time, so we don't have to blame them. But we can still hit on them for plenty of other reasons. All right, thanks.