In what has become a yearly tradition, it's now time for us to present 10 of the most noteworthy incidents on the Internet from this past year. As you'll see, 2010 has been very interesting.
Just like previous years, we have included problems ranging from website outages and service issues to large-scale network interruptions. If you're an avid Web user, you are bound to recognize several of them.
Let's get started! The major incidents on the Internet in 2010 were…
Wikipedia's Failover Fail
Wikipedia has become so ubiquitous that it can't go down for a minute without people noticing. According to Google Trends for Websites, the site has roughly 50 million visitors per day.
In March, servers in Wikimedia's European data center overheated and shut down. The service was supposed to fail over to a US data center. Unfortunately, the failover mechanism didn't work properly and broke the DNS lookups for all of Wikipedia. This effectively rendered the site unreachable worldwide. It took several hours before everyone could access the site again.
WordPress.com's Big-Blog Crash
WordPress.com got a bad start this year when a network issue caused the biggest outage the service had seen in four years. The outage became extra noticeable because of the sheer number of blogs it hosts, including high-profile blogs like TechCrunch, GigaOM, and the Wired blogs. The WordPress.com outage took down blogs for almost two hours in February.
Gmail's Multiple Outages
Gmail, one of the world's most popular email services and an integral part of Google Apps, had several notable outages this year. These issues didn't always affect Gmail's entire user base, but enough to make headlines.
In February, routine maintenance caused a disruption that cascaded from data center to data center, knocking out Gmail worldwide for about 2.5 hours. In March, Gmail had an issue that lasted up to 36 hours for some users. Another incident happened early in September when overloaded routers made the service completely unavailable for almost two hours.
China Reroutes the Internet
In April, China Telecom spread incorrect traffic routes to the rest of the Internet. During 18 minutes, as much as 15% of the traffic on the Internet was sent via China because routers believed it was the most effective route to take.
Similar incidents have happened before, like when YouTube was hijacked globally by a small Pakistani ISP two years ago. Normally, this results in a crash since the ISP can't handle the traffic. However, China Telecom was able to handle the traffic, so most people never noticed this. They may have only noticed increased latency as traffic took a long and awkward route across the Internet via China.
Even though no serious outage happened, it's a fascinating disruption of the traffic flow. Renesys has a more in-depth explanation of this incident and how it could happen. It wasn't necessarily an intentional hijacking.
Twitter's World Cup Woes
Twitter seemed like the ideal companion to the World Cup. Tweeting about the World Cup proved so popular that it slowed down or broke Twitter several times during the event. This effectively load-tested Twitter's infrastructure, revealing potential weaknesses. As a result, Twitter's service today is likely more stable.
Facebook's Feedback Loop
Facebook, with more than 500 million users, has an aggressive development philosophy: "don't be afraid to break things." This approach has been key to Facebook's success, but sometimes it does break things.
Facebook's worst outage in four years came in September when an update to Facebook's backend code caused a feedback loop that overloaded its databases. The only way for Facebook to recover was to take down the entire site, remove the bad code, and then bring the site back online. Facebook was offline for approximately 2.5 hours.
Foursquare's Double Whammy
Foursquare's location-based social network has been a success, gathering a following of millions. When the service went down for roughly 11 hours early in October, people noticed. The culprit was an overloaded database. Almost exactly the same thing happened the next day, taking the site down for an additional six hours.
Paypal's Payment Problems
When Paypal stumbles, thousands of merchants and millions of regular consumers feel the impact. In October, a problem with Paypal's network equipment crippled the service for up to 4.5 hours. At its peak, the issue affected all of Paypal's members worldwide for 1.5 hours.
Tumblr's Tumble
Tumblr was one of the great social media successes of 2010, but rapid growth brought scalability challenges. This culminated with a 24-hour outage early in December when all of Tumblr's 11 million blogs were offline due to a broken database cluster.
The Wikileaks Drama
If you've missed this, you must have been hiding under a rock. The site issues that Wikileaks experienced during Cablegate were significant. The site was the victim of a large-scale distributed denial-of-service attack, forcing Wikileaks to switch to a different web host. After moving to Amazon EC2, Amazon shut them down. Several countries blocked access to the Wikileaks site. The largest blow came when EveryDNS, the DNS provider for Wikileaks.org, shut down the domain.
Without a working domain name, Wikileaks could only be reached by its IP address. Since then, Wikileaks has spread its content over hundreds of sites and different domain names, including a new main site at Wikileaks.ch.
Adding to the drama, supporters of Wikileaks launched distributed denial-of-service attacks against services that cut off Wikileaks, including Paypal, VISA, Mastercard, Amazon, and EveryDNS. There was also collateral damage when attackers mistakenly targeted EasyDNS instead of EveryDNS.
The Wikileaks drama is without a doubt the Internet incident of the year.
Final Words
The events we listed here are just a small sample of what happened in 2010. Even without Wikileaks, it's been an eventful year on the Internet. The truth is that the Internet is not as stable as most of us would like to believe. It's a complex system, like a living organism, and things do break. Sometimes it's small-scale enough that nobody notices, and sometimes hundreds of millions of people are affected.
Hopefully, 2011 will be a less eventful year, but we wouldn't count on it.
