Recent outages from critical services across the net have created massive disruption in recent weeks: Whether it was Amazon’s S3 service failure, which took down thousands of sites, Cloudflare’s “Cloudbleed” security issue, which forced many sites to ask users to reset their passwords, or Google Wifi’s accidental reset, which wiped out customer’s internet profiles, the infrastructure behind the internet has looked substantially more unstable recently.
The packetized technology that underlies most of the internet was created by Paul Baran as part of an effort to protect communications by moving from a centralized model of communication to a distributed one. While the Internet Society questions whether the creation of the internet was in direct response to concerns about nuclear threat, it clearly agrees that “later work on Internetting did emphasize robustness and survivability, including the capability to withstand losses of large portions of the underlying networks.”
Dispatches From The Front 