[LINK] DNS outage?

[Paul Brooks]

Stilgherrian wrote:
> And an alert on the radio is similarly irrelevant for anyone not
> driving that particular roar, or not driving at all.
>
> I'm not seeing a whole lot of difference between that and "a damaged  
> cable in central Melbourne will mean slow access to overseas sites for  
> anyone using BigPond. iPrimus or many smaller ISPs.
How very Internet 1.0 of you Stil, thinking of the locality of the alert 
is only for local consumers of far-off content sources!

I can easily see that same alert as needing to be "a damaged cable in 
central Melbourne will mean slow
access for anyone either within Australia or overseas when attempting to 
access sites or content physically located in Melbourne"
....and potentially distributed globally.

turning it around: should we expect an alert on the radio for a backhoe 
in California taking out access to major content sources there - which 
could easily have a greater impact on Internet traffic than a more local 
event?

Or, more concisely:

Road traffic needs out-of-band notification, as it has no inherent 
in-band rerouting mechanism - drivers unaware of a problem will continue 
to drive into the trouble zone.
The Internet has BGP-4.

P.