Sprint Breaks The Internet

[superbus.livejournal.com]

The following is a cut and paste of what I submitted to Slashdot just now, my first submission ever:

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I work as a security analyst at an internet security company. While troubleshooting an issue, we learned why our customer couldn't keep his site-to-site VPN going from any location that uses Sprint as it's ISP: Sprint has decided not to route traffic to Cogent due to litigation.

This has a chilling effect; already, this person I worked with cannot communicate between a few sites of his, and since Sprint is stopping the connections cold (my traceroutes showed as complete, and not as timing out), it means that there is no backup plan; anyone going to Cogent from a Sprint ISP is crap out of luck. What this means to me is that third parties control our information, and they'll do with it what they damn well please.

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I'm still aghast at this. Sprint broke the internet intentionally.

EDIT: Holy shit I made it!

Comments

[tmesser.livejournal.com]

It's certainly not the first time an ISP has terminated a peering agreement with Cogent. But yes, all it really does is break the Internet and shaft the end users.

[toxico.livejournal.com]

Good info; thanks for pointing that out. Have passed along the article to my superiors.

[silveryrose.livejournal.com]

That explains why a couple of my friends haven't been able to get onto iRO tonight. They're all on ISPs that go through the sprint/nextel network.

Thanks for posting this, I'll give them the heads up.

[gholam.livejournal.com]

Asshats, the lot of them.

[mirar.livejournal.com]

In March or so Cogent started dropping packets meant for Telia (http://news.google.se/archivesearch?q=cogent+telia&btnG=Search&ie=UTF-8&oe=utf-8&um=1). I would suspect it's not Sprint that is to blame, but Cogent, given their history (http://news.google.se/archivesearch?q=cogent+internet&btnG=Search&num=100&hl=en&um=1&ie=UTF-8).

[lihan161051.livejournal.com]

Apparently pissing matches over legal disputes are now the exception to the old adage that "the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it". :p

(although there's a lot to be concerned about in the ways in which the network's structure has changed -- tree structures don't provide as many alternate routes as the much more redundantly connected original backbone structures inherited from the ARPANET, and the current structure is increasingly dendritic -- as well as the fact that the backbone is now owned by a few large carriers who are increasingly able to pull stunts like this when they get adversarial with each other..)

[mattcaron.livejournal.com]

I see government regulation coming out of this. After all, imagine if the various phone networks or electrical grids pulled this - which I think may be illegal, actually.

[sigurther.livejournal.com]

Yeah, once you start undermining the necessary infrastructure of a nation, people start getting kinda pissy. ;)

[superbus.livejournal.com]

If it's not illegal, it should be. There was no warning for this, and we only found it because someone had the foresight to Google "sprint + cogent". I think my question when I heard this ("OK, so why has Sprint decided to break the internet?") was apropos, but this scares me because now, it proves my point: we're at the mercy of third parties who can wage their own corporate warfare, using our connectivity as leverage. You can't get to this site? Well, blame those mealy mouthed maggots over at $ISP! You're one of their customers? Well, why not join our more reliable network, at a better price...

I refuse to be considered leverage. I typically don't like big government, but this is unacceptable, and needs to be regulated.

[pfloyd.livejournal.com]

I'm feeling the effects here, as I work for an ISP. At first, callers were stating, "I cant reach such-and-such website." I took a call a couple of hours ago from a caller who stated their email provider is on Sprint's network, and basically unreachable.

Hurts us too, in a big big way, as we now have to find a way to reroute traffic.

[kgasso.livejournal.com]

Simply shutting down peering between two providers shouldn't break anything; traffic should route around it through other peering or transit connections on either end.

My guess is Sprint canceled their settlement-free interconnect agreement and de-peered them due to an unfavorable traffic ratio in Cogent's favor (too much traffic benefiting Cogent only on a free peering link that should benefit both parties).

Sounds like someone botched the de-peering and filtered announcements incorrectly, or Cogent doesn't have enough capacity on their other links to handle traffic that would have normally gone through Sprint (I don't know any destinations that are unreachable that I can test this with though).

Didn't the same thing happen with Level3 de-peered them?

[jimbojones.livejournal.com]

Note: don't get me wrong, it's a GIANT pain in the ass and et cetera, but it's still possible to Get There From Here: implement temporary static routing that exits backbone X at a different point which WILL then properly route to backbone Y.

In other words, do the thing the internet was supposed to do automatically.

I would agree with you that false-routing should be illegal. Refusing to route directly is one thing, but FALSE routing (what gives you the "traceroute complete") to a fake endpoint is another entirely; a deliberate attempt to subvert the functionality of the internet.