Mass Blackout Takes Russian Internet Offline

RedditEnjoyer@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 287 points –
Mass Blackout Takes Russian Internet Offline - The Moscow Times
themoscowtimes.com
25

And for a short while, twitter was silent.

It legitimately surprised me back when Russia first attacked Ukraine how parts of the internet suddenly reverted in tone to how the early 2000s internet used to be. The posts pushing subtle division in random message forums just stopped for a few days.

Really made me realize how pervasive the social engineering of English speakers by outside agencies has become online. I think about it much more, using that brief cessation as a touchstone. Like, my memories of forums being saner weren't false, heh.

Not to mention half the attempts in /var/log/auth.log

Edit: This probably wouldn't reduce the number of attempts, but I'm leaving my try at a joke up.

For everyone who only read the title, a couple of Russian TLDs were no longer available in DNS. That's a far cry from "internet offline."

That's not even remotely interesting. DNS/BGP issues used to be common in the ol' days!

I was wondering where all the protest vote and vote strike advocates went!

Do you hear that? That's nothing. That's the sound of silence. Enjoy it.

I can pull up yandex just fine.

Yandex has a large office in Amsterdam. Not sure where its all served from but they have offices in 12 countries.

yandex.com resolves to mother russia

% This is the RIPE Database query service.
% The objects are in RPSL format.
%
% The RIPE Database is subject to Terms and Conditions.
% See https://apps.db.ripe.net/docs/HTML-Terms-And-Conditions

% Note: this output has been filtered.
%       To receive output for a database update, use the "-B" flag.

% Information related to '77.88.55.0 - 77.88.55.255'

% Abuse contact for '77.88.55.0 - 77.88.55.255' is 'abuse@yandex.ru'

inetnum:        77.88.55.0 - 77.88.55.255
netname:        YANDEX-77-88-55
status:         ASSIGNED PA
country:        RU
descr:          Yandex enterprise network
admin-c:        YNDX1-RIPE
tech-c:         YNDX1-RIPE
remarks:        INFRA-AW
org:            ORG-YA1-RIPE
mnt-by:         YANDEX-MNT
source:         RIPE
created:        2012-10-12T12:22:03Z
last-modified:  2022-04-05T15:29:50Z

That doesn't mean the servers are physically located in Russia. It just means they are controlled by an organisation that considers Russia their primary country.

whois $(dig -t A yandex.com +short | head -1)

It doesn't 'resolve' to Russia. The IP was allocated to yandex who's record for that block is listed in Russia. Any IP addres in that /24 can literally be used anywhere in their infrastructure anywhere in the world.

I have a VPS for example that RIPE shows is allocated to a company in Germany but the physical server sits in a datacenter on the west coast of the US.

I’m sure they have sufficient infrastructure to route elsewhere if Russian servers are inaccessible. I doubt anyway that servers in the rest of the world are typically served from Russia since that would be inefficient.