Reflections on outages, evolution of the CDN market, location data
Link and routers fails, but routing protocols have been designed to cope with these failures and preserve connectivity. While most failures are caused by hardware issues or software bugs, some outages that affect network and servers are caused by configuration errors. A small change in the configuration of one of a few devices can have a huge effect on a network. In some cases, configurations changes have caused a cascade of problems that brought complete networks down. Andree Toonk published a very interesting blog post were he discusses some of the lessons which can be learned from large outages.