Internet outage problems with Mike Dobuski from ABC News

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
So did you were you affected by this cloud flare outage?
It disrupted X and then chat GPT. No, those are
some of the platforms that were impacted by this. But
let's get the very latest and bring in Mike Dubuski,
ABC News.

Speaker 2 (00:18):
Mike, how are you man? How you doing doing well?

Speaker 3 (00:20):
Doing well? Then well with buile guys.

Speaker 2 (00:22):
Yeah, I know, welcome in. Good to hear you.

Speaker 1 (00:25):
And and what's it doing in New York as far
as the weather. I always like to check in, Like
I had Alec Stone last hour and he's in LA.

Speaker 2 (00:33):
I'm like, what are we doing there?

Speaker 1 (00:34):
And he told us, and you're probably similar to what
we got going in the city there, I would imagine.

Speaker 3 (00:39):
Yeah, I would think so, yeah, I would say, this
is our last like decent week of fall weather before
it gets really cold. Right, it's not too bad out there.
It was cold yesterday, but it's okay.

Speaker 1 (00:48):
Today, right, right, Absolutely, So what happened there were I'm
guessing millions and millions of people that were affected by
this outage today.

Speaker 3 (00:57):
Yeah, we're still trying to wrap our heads around the
exact gale of this outage. But this all goes back
to a company known as Cloudflare not exactly a household
name by any stretch of the imagination, but a really
important company when it comes to Internet infrastructure. A good
way to think about this company, guys, is like a middleman.
They are the guys who direct your requests when you

(01:19):
type in a website into a web browser. So let's say,
for example, you were going to go to a you know,
a great website like abcnews dot com. You type that
into your browser. Cloudflare is making sure that abcnews dot
com is not getting overloaded with requests. They're also making
sure that the request that's being made doesn't come from
a bad actor or a hacker or a bot or

(01:40):
something like that. So they're kind of internet middlemen, and
they experienced this big outage this morning, lasting for about
three hours and affecting a huge swath of the Internet.
We think about twenty percent of online providers in some
way do business with cloud Flare. So we saw major
companies like x formerly Twitter go offline for a period.
I'm also Spotify, chantchipt as you guys mentioned. Even the

(02:04):
website that we used to track outages like this, which
is called down Detector, was itself down for a little
bits most so really did cut a pretty big plot
of the Internet down. But the good news is cloud
Flair resolved this pretty early on today and it seems
like things are for the most part back to normal.

Speaker 2 (02:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:21):
Irony, irony there, oh the irony, as they say, So,
was it a cyber attack?

Speaker 2 (02:27):
I mean, I feel like and if it is, Mike.

Speaker 1 (02:30):
I feel like that it is a wonder that we
don't have more of these or do we? And they just,
you know, they they kind of nip them in the
bud before it really gets crazy and then becomes obviously
this nationwide or even worldwide thing where people are like, oh,
what happened? I mean, I can't believe we don't have
more of these if in fact this was maybe a
mini cyber attack or something possibly like that.

Speaker 3 (02:53):
Yeah, it was not a cyber attack from what we understand,
and that comes from the company itself. They actually outlined
what the problem was. They're pretty transparent about this early
on as they were working to fix the problem. The
CTO of cloud Flare, guy named Dane Next, posted on
social media that this appears to have been a bug
in the code for one of their security services, basically

(03:13):
one that's meant to guard against bot networks. Of course,
we think back to last months when the AWS outage happens,
seems to be somewhat larger than this outage. That was
a similar thing, right, It was just sort of a
faulty bit of code, one line that went wrong when
people were trying to fix things maybe on the back end,
and it had these outsized ripple effects, which really does

(03:35):
underscore guys. Yeah, sure there's a cybersecurity concern when it
comes to foreign actors and hackers and things like that,
but ultimately our internet infrastructure comes back to just a
handful of companies, cloud Flare among them, meaning that when
one little thing goes wrong, it can knock down a
big piece of our online lives. I think the thing
that we said last month during the AWS outage is

(03:58):
still true today. People are going to need to start
thinking about diversifying where they do business online in terms
of hosting and now security.

Speaker 1 (04:05):
Then AWS you mentioned is do they have like basically
one Well I don't know that you would even know this,
but do they do you know, if they have just
kind of like.

Speaker 2 (04:15):
One like home kind of what's the world I'm looking.

Speaker 1 (04:19):
For, like their their home base or over farm, like,
do they they.

Speaker 3 (04:24):
Have multiple diversified in terms of like where they are.

Speaker 2 (04:27):
Because I saw.

Speaker 1 (04:28):
The reason I say it is because I you know,
I'm in Vegas last week. I'm driving, I'm on well
two fifteen, I think, and I was heading out west
and I look over. I'm driving by this huge building.
You know, AWS was on it, and I go, I
wonder if that's like the main hub or whatever.

Speaker 2 (04:45):
But you're saying there's multiple hubs everywhere.

Speaker 3 (04:47):
And in fact, that outage from last month could be
traced back to a specific font like server location, and
I believe it was northern Virginia if memory served. But yeah, again,
a lot of this comes back to you guys. We
don't really think of compute this way because they're so globalized.
But service or website will load quicker if they're pulling
it from a local place, right, So that's kind of

(05:09):
part of how this works. But it also means that
it's kind of tougher to track down problems. It can
lead to these sort of knock on effects that we
saw today.

Speaker 1 (05:16):
Very good, All right, Mike Dubuski, ABC News, and Mike,
thank you very much for the latest on this.

Speaker 2 (05:22):
Hopefully, hopefully, we don't have much of that to report
on in the future, so yeah, we'll see.

Speaker 1 (05:28):
All right, Mike, Thanks appreciate that. And uh, I did
want to I want to shout out to Malachi who's
with Direct TV, and he showed up.

Speaker 2 (05:38):
I was having trouble with my I.

Speaker 1 (05:40):
Thought for sure it was the Genie box, like the
box for Direct TV. I thought, man, this is something
that felt to me like based on all of the
eliminating that I did your TV.

Speaker 4 (05:53):
You checked your TV and it was working fine by itself. Yeah,
that's a logical conclusion. The box is a bad.

Speaker 1 (05:59):
Well well yeah, and right, I checked, you know, the
HDMI connection. I checked everything. RG six runs into. There's
all just all kinds of stuff that my little teeny
brain for the most part new the kind of surface
stuff to check, if you will. And I couldn't get
it figured out. It's like, it's gotta be the box
went bad or something. So Malachi shows up from Direct

(06:22):
TV this morning. By the way, I love it, and
they when they go you're between eight am and noon,
I'm like, okay, cool.

Speaker 2 (06:29):
At eight oh one, there he is.

Speaker 1 (06:30):
He's right, I'm first on his So he comes in,
he starts going through everything, and he gets to the
point where he changes out the box because he starts to.

Speaker 2 (06:38):
Agree with me.

Speaker 1 (06:39):
He's like, oh, maybe it is the Genie box. He
switches it out. No, can't do it is not what's happening.
So he says to me, the motherboard is fried in
your TV. I go, oh, no, you're kidding me. He goes, listen,
that's all that's left here, and I said, well, I can.
I can pull up like some of the stream, for instance,

(07:01):
was still coming through on the TV. And he goes, well,
the motherboard, being the way that it is, controls different
types of things.

Speaker 2 (07:09):
Your HDMI is goofy on. What's going on here?

Speaker 1 (07:12):
The way to connect it's goofy And that is definitely
symbolic of what you know could be a motherboard. But
I'm I really would bet you if we could crack
this thing open and look, I can.

Speaker 2 (07:24):
I'm telling you that's what happened.

Speaker 1 (07:26):
And so I start doing a little research after he left,
and I figured it out that he's probably right.

Speaker 2 (07:32):
So I uh, I look back outside.

Speaker 1 (07:35):
Within a few minutes, he's still out there and he's
just writing up his order and I go out, I go, hey,
will you do me a favor, help me get this
TV off the wall, because I had him mounted on
the wall. So he was kind enough to come in
and do that helped me get the TV down. So
I went and I got another TV, and already I
already have it up and everything I did all that

(07:55):
before I ended up coming in today. But I thought
to myself, geez, it's he goes, you had a power
surge of some sort that got to you. I'm at
so I'm at best Buy and I get a new
I get a new TV, get it back home and
all this. But while I'm there, I thought it was interesting.
I'm talking to the guy and I said, he goes,
do you want to get the extended warrantine? I said, boy,

(08:17):
I wish I had it right now because I'd be
using it. He goes, yeah, he want to. I said, well,
I don't know. What about having surge protectors on, you know,
like the strips, like the power strips or whatever.

Speaker 2 (08:30):
And he says, you know, those are only good ones.

Speaker 1 (08:34):
In other words, a power surge hits those and it
becomes just a regular strip of out.

Speaker 2 (08:38):
Okay.

Speaker 4 (08:39):
And I read that earlier, and I'm wondering this. Why
then is there not some sort of indicator to show
you it's burnt, it's surged out, you better replace it.

Speaker 1 (08:48):
So you so you've heard this before too, because I
was telling Zach and Zach didn't.

Speaker 2 (08:52):
He's like, I never heard of that either.

Speaker 4 (08:54):
What if the power surge is while you were away
from home, you come home, you don't know it's done it.
There should be some sort of you know, like your
smoke detector when the battery needs changed or whatever, something
to alert you to the fact that this thing needs
to be changed, otherwise it's no longer protecting, right.

Speaker 1 (09:10):
So yep, from what I understand, it's one and done
with those now it'll protect you the one time. But
like you said, if another surge comes back through right after,
then you're screwed.

Speaker 4 (09:20):
Yep, yep. I don't understand that that is a failure
in logic that we don't have some sort of notification
on that.

Speaker 2 (09:30):
I don't even know if it's real.

Speaker 1 (09:31):
I don't know if that's true. But you look around
and some of the things do say that. But I
had the guy tell me, I said, no kidding, I'd
never heard that.

Speaker 2 (09:39):
Was the guy at passed by who told me.

Speaker 1 (09:41):
He said, I've never heard that before, so I just
it's definitely a head scratcher. But I did have it
on a power strip because that was the first thing
I said to my guy from DirecTV.

Speaker 2 (09:52):
Now he did not say that to me. He just went, yeah, well, yeah.

Speaker 4 (09:56):
Well it's commons. You have to have it on a
power strip. The TV, the Roku box, a DVD player,
the cable or satellite box, the blah blah blah. There's
half a dozen things in that entertainment center that have
to be plugged in. It's common sense that will be
on a power strip. It's common sense that strip should
warn you if it needs to be replaced.

Speaker 1 (10:15):
You would think it feels like it feels like it
would be so elementary for them to make it that
way if it or it would be real easy common knowledge. Again,
that's the first that I had heard of that. And
I'm you know, you and I both we've been on
this earth a little while. You know, Zach attack does

(10:36):
he know the answer? Does he have a thought on this?

Speaker 2 (10:39):
Is that what we don't? I mean, he has the
thoughts on a lot of things.

Speaker 3 (10:44):
It's a ron okay in a while, yeah, right, I
think he has.

Speaker 2 (10:47):
A is he no, what we're laughter here? Or no,
you don't know, Okay, Aaron, welcome in.

Speaker 5 (10:54):
Hey, what's up buddy, Hey brother? You know, I just
happened to be I don't know what question you asked for.
I just was going to tell you I just moved
into a house and we had to have some electric
work done, and the first thing that electric company wanted
to do was sell me this surge protector that goes

(11:14):
right below my power box and it grounds my house
with this copper wire that goes straight to the ground,
and it comes with a big warning that you know,
if anything would happen like that, it would you know,
protect everything.

Speaker 2 (11:31):
Yeah, did you do it?

Speaker 5 (11:34):
Oh? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He said that a lot
of people have that stuff, but copper thieves come through
and cut them because they know they're there and they
know right where they're at and it's easy to cut.
But I didn't.

Speaker 2 (11:49):
Man.

Speaker 5 (11:49):
I'm sorry.

Speaker 2 (11:50):
It's okay, man, It's cool, Aaron.

Speaker 1 (11:52):
I know, and I thought maybe he had heard about
this and had some information on whether or not you
know that hour strips are you know, once a surge
goes into them, boom, they're smoked. After that, they just
become a normal outlet at that point, But I don't
know if there's any truth to that or not.