Enlarge / Detail of the ethernet ports on an Asus DSL-AC88U router, taken on November 30, 2017. (Photo by Olly Curtis/MacFormat Magazine/Future via Getty Images)

On Wednesday, Asus router users around the world took to the Internet to report that their devices suddenly froze up for no apparent reason and then, upon rebooting repeatedly, stopped working every few minutes as device memory became exhausted.

Two days later, the Taiwan-based hardware maker has finally answered the calls for help. The mass outage, the company said , was the result of “an error in the configuration of our server settings file.” After fixing the glitch, most users needed to only reboot their devices. In the event that didn’t fix the problem, the company’s support team advised users to save their current configuration settings and perform a factory reset. The company also apologized.

It was a frustrating two days for many users as they attempted to troubleshoot the outage. Asus’ silence during that time only added to the frustration.

Enlarge (credit: Western Digital )

Users of the Western Digital My Cloud service are fuming after a network breach has locked them out of their data for more than 24 hours and has put company-handled information into the hands of currently unknown hackers.

The inability to access data stored in My Cloud was reported on social media by multiple users, including this one , who indicated the outage started sometime on Saturday. Since then, the number of users (and their anxiety levels) have only ratcheted up.

Sounds like ransomware

By early morning California time on Monday, Western Digital issued a release saying that a week ago Sunday the company learned that an “unauthorized third party gained access to a number of the Company’s systems.” The release added: “​​Based on the investigation to date, the Company believes the unauthorized party obtained certain data from its systems and is working to understand the nature and scope of that data.”

Enlarge (credit: SOPA Images / Contributor | LightRocket )

Late Wednesday afternoon, Twitter began experiencing international outages, with many users unable to perform basic functions like tweeting, sending direct messages, and following accounts. When Ars reporters attempted to tweet, an error message was generated saying that a daily limit of tweets had been reached, even from accounts that had not tweeted that day. According to Twitter , users typically have to tweet 2,400 times to reach the platform’s daily limit.

Independent Internet monitor NetBlocks tweeted that the outages impacted Twitter's website, mobile app, and features like posting and retweeting and were “not related to country-level Internet disruptions or filtering.”

Twitter has no communications department to follow up to confirm if the apparent outage is due to a bug or recent product update, both possible causes reported by CNBC .

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Sports-focused streaming-video service FuboTV said a “criminal cyber attack” was responsible for a prolonged outage that prevented subscribers from viewing most of Thursday’s World Cup semifinals between France and Morocco.

“The incident was not related to any bandwidth constraints on Fubo’s part,” the company said . “We were instead the target of a criminal cyber attack.”

There was no indication that customer data was accessed or downloaded or that the hack was related to a ransomware attack. The company has retained security firm Mandiant to investigate the intrusion. A spokeswoman declined to immediately answer questions and said the company would provide an update once it had more information.

Is it on topic for my blog? Maybe not, but it has come up in conversation enough times already that I think people are interested about it. So here's a quick bunch of links for you, in case you're curious and would like to learn more.

As you may or may not have noticed (I'm guessing that you did notice) that Facebook went poof yesterday for a number of hours. Here's the overview from Brian Krebs .

The impact was broader than you might have realized. Sheera Frankel of the New York Times tweeted , "Was just on phone with someone who works for FB who described employees unable to enter buildings this morning to begin to evaluate extent of outage because their badges weren’t working to access doors." Oof.

What went wrong? Mitchell Clark of The Verge presciently joked about the gut instinct that “it’s always DNS or BGP ."

And lo, it was indeed BGP. Celso Martinho and Tom Strickx from Cloudflare posted a detailed beakdown of what they saw .

And here's what Facebook has to say about it .

Errors in a BGP configuration can do nasty things. Remember when Pakistan accidentally knocked Youtube off the internet ?

I honestly hope nobody gets fired over this. Improve systems, failsafes, checks and balances, when something like this happens. But don't lay the blame at the feet of an individual who might have typo'd a configuration entry. Instead, I hope they use it as a learning experience to improve processes so it takes more that one person's cut and paste to bring the whole thing down.

Značky: #bgp, #routing, #Network, #facebook, #outage