Earlier this week, a number of websites experienced major outages. Users from various countries and regions were not able to access them for an entire day. The cause behind the problem was quickly discovered – the Internet is running out of space.
One of the websites that were affected was eBay. A few days ago, UK users of the platform were not able to log in for about 24 hours. As a result, many people and the website, as well, suffered big trade looses. Other sites, like those of The Telegraph and LastPass, were also struck by the outage.
Luckily, these problems were not caused by hackers. Instead, they were found to stem from a glitch in the web’s Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). Unfortunately, that may end up being a worst case scenario.
Border Gateway Protocol is like a map of web routes. Networks use these complex paths to send one another information. Web users, on the other hand, need to be directed on these paths through routers. However, as it turns out, many of these routers have become outdated. Smart mobile devices can be partly blamed for that. The routers in question are not quite compatible with smartphones and tablets. In addition, they cannot handle the additional traffic created by them because they neither have the processing power, nor the memory to do that. This can be compared to the human brain on a long trip. When we travel for a long time, we are not able to remember every street we have been to. Out brain goes beyond its normal capacity and fails to memorize such details.
Another cause behind the major outage of the Internet is related to outdated IP addresses on which most computers rely today. Although they should be replaced at some point in the future with the more advanced IPv6 address system, at present, the pace with which that is happening is too slow.
The combination of these factors have pushed the Internet go over its capacity. The results of such outages can include losses of millions of dollars for large web companies, like eBay, as well as trade losses for everybody else. Moreover, according to experts like James Gill, who is a chief executive of internet traffic monitoring company, this is just the beginning. Therefore, we may need to get used to that, since such Internet glitches may become regular at some point.
