An unintentional mistake by an engineer at a South African Internet service provider led to a massive Internet outage on the African continent. The incident prompted the development of new safety protocols at the company.
Internet collapse in Africa
Network engineer's fatal mistake
On a routine day at work, an employee at South Africa's largest Internet service provider made a mistake that led to an unprecedented Internet communications crisis on the continent. A specialist named Paton, who held the position of a backbone network engineer, made a mistake that had serious consequences.
Scale of influence of the provider
The company where Paton worked played a key role in providing Internet communications not only in the Republic of South Africa, but also in neighboring countries. This provider's DNS servers served thousands of domains, including the country code top-level domains of several African countries.
Fatal Moment
On the day of the incident, Paton was tasked with updating network blocks and distributing them via BGP to partners and transit providers. This required changes to access control lists (ACLs). Paton usually performed such work with special care, but this time his colleagues invited him to take a break, and he hurried to complete the task.
Consequences of haste
Returning from a cigarette break, Paton discovered real chaos in the office. The network operations center was inundated with calls from angry customers. It turned out that the largest Internet outage in the African region at that time had occurred.
False alarm and investigation
To complicate the situation, an anonymous person claiming to be a hacker contacted a local technology publication and said about his involvement in the incident. This message quickly spread, creating additional problems for the company's management. However, the investigation showed that there was no hacking of security systems.
The real cause of the failure
It turned out that Paton, in a hurry, mistakenly replaced all existing access control lists instead just add new network blocks. This caused the complex Internet traffic routing system for large parts of Sub-Saharan Africa to fail.
Lessons for the future
After the incident, Paton not only restored the ACL and updated the network blocks, but also developed the company's first protocol change management. This document was a set of rules and procedures governing the process of making changes to IT systems in order to prevent similar incidents and operational failures in the future.
Glossary
- ACL (Access Control List) - access control list that defines access rules to network resources for different users or groups of users.
- BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) is the main routing protocol between autonomous systems on the Internet, allowing routes to be transmitted between different networks.
- DNS servers are domain name system servers responsible for resolving domain names into IP addresses.
- South Africa is a country in the southern African continent where the described incident occurred.
- Sub-Saharan Africa is a region of Africa located south of the Sahara Desert that has suffered from an Internet outage.
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What Caused Africa's Biggest Internet Outage?
What role did the company where Paton worked play in making the Internet work?
How did customers and the media react to the outage?
What measures were taken after the incident to prevent similar situations in the future?
What task was Paton doing when the error occurred?
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Discussion of the topic – How a system administrator's smoking break left half of Africa without the Internet
The article talks about a case where an engineer at a South African Internet provider mistakenly deleted important network settings while rushing for a cigarette break. This led to the largest Internet outage on the African continent to date.
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