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yahoo outage: misconfiged routers or hackers?



There is a dangerous tendency to blame unknown forces for all
screwups. I'm ashamed to admit that I once was certain that hackers had
deleted some files that my .history files later proved were vanished by my
own clumsy mistyping (ouch). But this is much bigger. How often are
mysterious forces blamed for wrongs? Remind you of any one in 1984?

 ---------- Forwarded message ---------- 
Date: Tue, 08 Feb 2000 10:59:00-0500
From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>

http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,34178,00.html

                        Routers Blamed for Yahoo Outage
                        by Declan McCullagh and Joanna Glasner

                        5:00 p.m. 7.Feb.2000 PST
                        Most of the Yahoo network was
                        unreachable for three hours on Monday
                        as the company weathered what it
                        described as a widespread malicious
                        attack on its Web sites.

                        Attackers reportedly laid siege to the
                        Internet's second most popular
                        destination at about 10:30 a.m. PST,
                        snarling Yahoo's internal network and
                        denying millions of visitors access to mail,
                        schedules, and the directory service.

                        An engineer at another company that
                        receives Internet access from the same
                        provider, Global Center, told Wired News
                        the outage was due to misconfigured
                        equipment.

                        The person, who asked to remain
                        anonymous, said that his firm also lost
                        connectivity through Global Center's
                        Sunnyvale, California, facility during the
                        same time period due to apparent router
                        problems, not hacker attacks.

                        Details remained sketchy, with service
                        provider Global Center blaming an
                        intentional surge in traffic and Yahoo
                        claiming a cadre of as-yet-unknown
                        vandals fouled their system. No Web
                        content appeared to have been altered or
                        deleted.

                        [...]