This may be nothing, but Reddit and The Guardian are out and intermittently there are reports also of Amazon, CNN, The New York Times, and BBC down. Reddit says “Fastly Error” so it may be nothing more than one cloud computing service crashing.
The BBC Minutes ago (was not down for me)
A number of leading websites are currently not working, including Amazon, Reddit and Twitch.
A number of leading websites are currently not working, including Amazon, Reddit and Twitch.
The UK government website – gov.uk – is also down as is parts of the BBC and a host of other media outlets.
Affected websites displayed the message: “Error 503 Service Unavailable”.
Early reports suggested it could be related to Fastly, a cloud computing provider, which underpins a lot of major websites.
UPDATE: It appears to be solved according to The Australian. Just another odd cyber thing. There seem to be a lot of them lately. Almost like someone was rattling the cage.
Also Seeking Alpha, Investors Chronicle part of the FT group) as I write.
is this not a warning sign of how vulnerable we all are in terms of cloud computing?
160
Yes. It is.
And, what’s more, as the technology gets ever more complex there is an ever decreasing cohort of intelligence that has the capacity to understand what’s happening and to find the strategies to deal with it.
We, the Human race, is constrained by its own intelligence.
50
My anti-virus pops up a panel that tells me my pooter is protected and free of nasties and I believe it because I want to. Mad!
20
The biggest vulnerability is how the management at major cloud providers has become so politically driven, they will cancel anyone who doesn’t drink the Kool-aid.
The fear of disappearing is how the political enforcement arms of repressive governments work and must not be tolerated under any circumstances, even if it’s only your digital life at stake.
50
The Colonial Pipeline Hack, The ‘Russians’, & The FBI’s Ransom-Grab – What Really Happened?
Speculation has been running rampant over today’s FBI press conference revealing the recovery of most of the ransom paid to “Russian” hackers by Colonial Pipeline.
Ben THE Kaufman summarizes:
Media: “The FBI hacked Bitcoin and can take anyone’s funds.”
Reality: The pipeline hackers didn’t have the Bitcoin in the first place but kept it in a remote server the FBI could access with subpoena.
Media coverage is mostly lies at this point.
Which raises the following point (h/t Jordan Schachtel):
So the “hackers” brought down the largest pipeline on the east coast…
…but couldn’t spend 50 bucks on a clean hardware wallet to secure their bitcoin?
Makes sense to me!
So what really happened?
Now, here’s where things get weird:
The feds did not “hack” a bitcoin wallet in this manner, though they certainly seemed happy to give off that impression, as it sows doubt about the security of the bitcoin network.
The DOJ has historically been extremely hostile to bitcoin, labeling it as a preferred monetary system for cyber criminals, despite bitcoin transactions being publicly available to anyone with access to the internet.
A DOJ warrant from Monday morning gives us much more detail about how the government actually secured the bitcoin funds. They did so by obtaining a warrant on a bitcoin wallet or exchange that had servers in Northern California. Yes, you read that correctly. The entity responsible for the ransomware attack did not in fact have custody over their bitcoin. Instead, they were using a custodian for their funds. It is unclear whether this account with servers in the United States is an FBI wallet or the affiliate’s wallet, but the major error in bitcoin 101 custody remains the surprising issue. Using a custodian for your funds instead of maintaining possession of them is a very basic error, especially for an allegedly sophisticated hacking gang.
Given that bitcoin transactions are publicly available, it was easy for the feds to track the funds transferred from Colonial to this outfit, as Colonial’s initial transfer to the bitcoin wallet is public information. All they had to do was “follow the money,” which strangely made its way into a U.S. based custodial address.
30
Biden’s America: 60 Members of Congress Victims of Latest Ransomware Attack
00
All my favourite football sites were down all morning, reporting ‘Guru’ error. Now they’ve all come back in the last 5 minutes.
40
SMH is reporting it as an internal error, a bug in my terminology. Not malicious.
The article, posted about 8 am Sydney time, is paywalled, but may still be accessible to occasional users.
https://www.smh.com.au/technology/fastly-internet-chaos-a-reminder-of-how-vulnerable-websites-are-20210609-p57zaz.html?btis
Cheers
Dave B
00
Service NSW was also down .
20
We can only hope that YouTwitFace will be down for many, many years … … … … …
130
When was there any of that in NSW?
10
That was a smarty’s comment to #4 Chad above.
Hmmm?
Are you also on the hit list Jo?
00
At 9:00pm Tuesday night Perth time those sites were all up for me. By the way, it’s the first time I’ve ever logged onto CNN or the NYT.
20
You will need to sanitise and dust your computer with quicklime
40
or refer to Hillary Clinton on how to clean computer hardware….
10
Maybe China or Russia with love, but borrowing from Tom Lehrer, everybody blames the Jews.
30
What is Fastly and why did it just take a bunch of major websites offline?
PUBLISHED TUE, JUN 8 202110:44 AM EDTUPDATED 14 MIN AGO
Ryan Browne, Sam Shead
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/08/fastly-outage-internet-what-happened.html
10
Aloha! Its about trust! How can we accept digital currency or anything digital, especially voting, with no trust?
n
One of the first things I do when I am doing due diligence on a company or a person is I do a search by typing in the name and then the word “fraud”! For Fastly I did “Fastly fraud”!
I came up with this CCP connection back in Oct 2020.
NEW YORK, Oct. 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — Kaplan Fox & Kilsheimer LLP (www.kaplanfox.com) is investigating claims on behalf of investors of Fastly, Inc. (“Fastly” or the “Company”) (NYSE: FSLY), the provider of an edge cloud platform. A complaint has been filed on behalf of investors who purchased Fastly common stock between May 6, 2020 and August 5, 2020, inclusive (the “Class Period”).
On August 5, 2020, Fastly held its second quarter (“Q2”) 2020 earnings conference call. During the call, defendants disclosed that ByteDance, the Chinese company that operates the wildly popular mobile app TikTok, was Fastly’s largest customer in Q2 2020, and that TikTok represented about 12% of Fastly’s revenue for the six months ended June 30, 2020.
According to the complaint, this news shocked the market, as TikTok had been under heavy scrutiny by U.S. officials and others since at least late 2019 due to fears that the data it collects from its users could be accessed by the Chinese government.END
There you go. How can I trust anything Fastly says?
That little “search tip” has saved me a lot of drama and dollars!
80
Nah, it was just Klaus practising.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DKRvS-C04o
30
How smart is it to make everything more fragile, vulnerable and unreliable?
Then they throw away the ever reliable backup methods (paper and ink). We are setting our world for a mega-crash. Every year major banks have a computer glitch. In UK in late May it was Santander down for a Saturday. People stopped and filled up with petrol only to have their cards and phone pay systems fail to function. If they had Cash or a cheque book they’d be fine but relying on electric payments is crazy and people were stuck.
If you havent heard of Cash or cheques they are marvellous new developments; they work without electricity, batteries, phone signals or computers. Ideal in the outback or a farm field. They are guaranteed to work when unreliable electric stuff fails in the coming blackouts.
80
🙂 good one.
But not to be caught short, our former President, MalEx444 has gone one step beyond cash even.
He uses gold.
He sent seven tonnes of it up to the Great Big Barrier Reef Foundation to be used to cover operating costs involved in “Saving the Coral Polyps”. More than twenty nine million polyps have been saved so far and that’s more than one for every Australian citizen.
We do need to get back to the reality of “hard currency”, something that won’t just disappear into the ether.
🙂
50
In South Africa – we ain’t got no cheques! The banks cancelled them a couple of years ago, because they were just too expensive to process. I know this because my wife worked in a bank’s software team that spent a couple of years trying to make the cheque processing system simpler and faster. Didn’t work well enough!
10
Maybe coincidence, or not, but yesterday our Verizon wireless service in SW Florida (Sarasota) was down most of the day, and interestingly today they pushed a security update out.
One wonders what a Carrington level event would do to our digital clouds now days?
40
I can remember when a rod on my abacus broke.
It took me a whole day to whittle and shape a new one.
Stuff happens.
70
“When the lights go out, know that we are in control.” – Q
20
Id agree with Micks comment. We were told this would happen.
There was talk of a new Quantum Financial System that was AI run being created. How true that is I dont know, but if true its the break the stranglehold the current N W O have on everything.
Time will tell….
30
I neglected a couple other items in my earlier post. Amazon flipped the switch today on sharing your internet connections by allowing their doorbell cameras and smart speakers use their new Sidewalk functionality, unless you opted out ahead of time. And of course, today is Microsoft update day here. Perhaps a confluence of things is what done it …..
https://hotair.com/ed-morrissey/2021/06/08/big-brother-inc-amazon-devices-share-your-network-connection-without-your-consent-n395278
30
I remember how the internet was meant to be awesome because of how decentralised it was. And what happened? Efficiencies of scale -> mass centralisation -> fewer and more significant points of control (and failure). Oops.
Maybe there’s a lesson in there somewhere.
20
A lot of the big web services are run out of Kansas.
10
I presume reliable coal powered electricity.
00