Offline
Last Friday, June 22nd, the University of Waterloo campus network and the Internet became two independent entities, a state which lasted for about 6 hours throughout the afternoon. The reason for lack of connectivity, as cited by IST, was “a Bell fiber-optic cable cut somewhere in Waterloo” (another source mentioned a cut somewhere between Waterloo and Toronto, as that’s where our school’s ISP lives).
The consequence of this: nobody on campus (including folks in school residences) could access the outside world (i.e. the Internet), and nobody outside campus could access any of the on-campus websites. If you think the implications of this are insignificant, consider the fact that most of the school assignments these days are stored electronically, and the majority of computer science and math students do their work by connecting to the on-campus UNIX servers.
That eventful Friday was a bright example of how depended the modern society is on the Internet, and the ability to connect anywhere from anywhere. Luckily, some of us had cell phones to check Gmail, and some even resorted to old-fashioned dial-up modems. I don’t know about the other faculties, but in the Math building, one could observe visible signs of distress - people frantically browsing whatever is still accessible (read - intranet websites, such as courseware and departmental pages), or playing solitare on school workstations, or whining.
Luckily, the problem was resolved soon enough (sooner than our on-campus IT expected), and Canada’s most innovative university got its lifeline back. Still, it made me wonder how fragile our cruicial infrastructures are. The entire university’s life clinging onto a single network cable? You would think they’d have multiple backups for this kind of thing, but I guess UW is trying to save money just like everybody else.
Apparently, both Wilfrid Laurier University and Conestoga College were also affected.
Ironically enough, this incident occured one day after the university hosted a turned-out-surprisingly-popular talk by Vint Cerf, one of the “founding fathers of the Internet” (Wikipedia). Right now he serves as a “Chief Internet Evangelist” at Google and calls himself a dinosaur, thinking he “belongs to a museum”. Nevertheless, his presentation was quite insightful, and he covered some of the important issues such as net neutrality, scalability, and latency of long-range internet connections (”Interplanetary Internet”). The influence of Vint’s talk on Thursday caused me to regard Friday’s incident as a tour into the past, when pretty much the only place you could access via a network was your fellow researchers’ machines.
I would have published this post on Friday, but, you know…