How An Engineer’s Little Mistake Nearly Broke The Entire Internet

Short Bytes: The internet is a beautiful place and many of us have established an unbreakable relationship with the same. However, it looks like that even a wrong key press can prove to be fatal for the worldwide internet infrastructure. The same happened whenSweden-based internet infrastructure company TeliaSonera is one of the few companies that are responsible for maintaining the basic infrastructure of the internet. TeliaSonera’s transatlantic cable network plays a major role in connecting the US to various European countries.

A recent internet outage has affected many services like WhatsApp, Facebook, Slack, Reddit, and CloudFlare. After this massive outage was reported across many countries, TeliaSonera sent a note to other network operators and informed them about the mishap.
As the problem was affecting a very large chunk of people worldwide, it was assumed that it was due to some damage or cut in some transatlantic cable.
However, as it turned out, the problem was caused due to an engineer’s little mistake. Apparently, he misconfigured an important router and directed all Europe’s internet traffic to Hong Kong.
Now this problem has been fixed by TeliaSonera and things should become normal very soon.
As expected, as a result of this error, TeliaSonera is facing flak from multiple tech giants who are its customers.
Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare, one of the biggest content delivery networks around, has called the reliability of TeliaSonera unacceptable.