Posts by Doug Madory

Every year the internet suffers numerous disruptions and outages, and 2021 was no exception. Kentik’s Doug Madory recaps the top 10. And now the world’s network engineers deserve a load of #HugOps in 2021.

Last month, the long-awaited film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi epic Dune was released in theaters and on HBO Max. Directed by Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve, the movie was a hit at the box office as well as via streaming, leading to another OTT traffic surge.

Facebook suffered a historic and nearly six-hour global outage on October 4. In this post, we look at Kentik’s view of the outage.

Last Tuesday, September 14th was the second Tuesday of the month, and for anyone running a network or working in IT, you know what that means: another Microsoft Patch Tuesday. Doug Madory looks at how the resulting traffic surge can be analyzed using Kentik’s OTT Service Tracking.

There has been a new development in The Mystery of AS8003.

As you may recall, this was the AS number registered to a defunct company in Florida that appeared earlier this year in the global routing table announcing over 175 million IPv4 addresses belonging to the US Department of Defense.

Well, that just changed.

As the last US military aircraft depart Kabul, so closes a chapter of U.S. involvement in the country. Will it also end a period of growth of the domestic internet in Afghanistan?

Africa’s regional internet registry, AFRINIC, is involved in a legal dispute over an increasingly valuable commodity: IPv4 address space. Kentik’s Doug Madory takes a deeper look at what’s happening.

On January 20, 2021, a great mystery appeared in the internet’s global routing table. An entity that hadn’t been heard from in over a decade began announcing large swaths of formerly unused IPv4 address space belonging to the U.S. Department of Defense. Registered as GRS-DoD, AS8003 began announcing 11.0.0.0/8 among other large DoD IPv4 ranges.

In the past 24hrs, Myanmar experienced a military coup d’état during which prominent government figures like Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi were detained and internet service was almost entirely blacked out.

Here is what the shutdown looked like in our data (with annotations for timing) for Myanmar’s big four: Myanma Posts and Telecommunications (MPT), Telenor Myanmar, Ooredoo Myanmar, and Mytel.

Last week I had the honor to participate in the PTC 2021 conference. Held in Hawaii every January, PTC’s annual conference is the Pacific Rim’s premier telecommunications event. Although this year’s conference was all virtual (no boondoggles to Honolulu!), it was no less important as the theme this year was New Realities. In the following blog post, I summarize what I presented in my PTC panel entitled Strategies to Meet Network Needs.

The shutdown in Egypt not only shifted the dynamics of protest in the 21st century, it was a watershed moment for the internet community — from technical organizations like Renesys to digital rights advocacy groups like Access Now. The era of the large-scale government-directed internet shutdown had truly begun.