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Destination Unreachable: Characterizing Internet Outages and Shutdowns

Authors:

Zachary S. Bischof,

Kennedy Pitcher,

Esteban Carisimo,

Rafael Bezerra Nunes,

Ramakrishna Padmanabhan,

Margaret E. Roberts,

Alex C. Snoeren,

Alberto DainottiAuthors Info & Claims

ACM SIGCOMM '23: Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2023 Conference

Pages 608 - 621

https://doi.org/10.1145/3603269.3604883

Published: 01 September 2023 Publication History

Abstract

In this paper, we provide the first comprehensive longitudinal analysis of government-ordered Internet shutdowns and spontaneous outages (i.e., disruptions not ordered by the government). We describe the available tools, data sources and methods to identify and analyze Internet shutdowns. We then merge manually curated datasets on known government-ordered shutdowns and large-scale Internet outages, further augmenting them with data on real-world events, macroeconomic and sociopolitical indicators, and network operator statistics. Our analysis confirms previous findings on the economic and political profiles of countries with government-ordered shutdowns. Extending this analysis, we find that countries with national-scale spontaneous outages often have profiles similar to countries with shutdowns, differing from countries that experience neither. However, we find that government-ordered shutdowns are many more times likely to occur on days of mobilization, coinciding with elections, protests, and coups. Our study also characterizes the temporal characteristics of Internet shutdowns and finds that they differ significantly in terms of duration, recurrence interval, and start times when compared to spontaneous outages.

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Cited By

Carisimo EKumar RWang CKlein SBustamante FSekar VYu MSeneviratne AVeitch D(2024)Ten years of the Venezuelan crisis - An Internet perspectiveProceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2024 Conference10.1145/3651890.3672218(521-539)Online publication date: 4-Aug-2024
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Wu WBischof ZTestart CDainotti AVallina-Rodríguez NSuarez-Tángil GLevin DPelsser C(2024)Poster: Enhancing Internet Disruption Investigation via Path MonitoringProceedings of the 2024 ACM on Internet Measurement Conference10.1145/3646547.3689675(777-778)Online publication date: 4-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3646547.3689675
Fontugne RTashiro MSommese RJonker MBischof ZAben EVallina-Rodríguez NSuarez-Tángil GLevin DPelsser C(2024)The Wisdom of the Measurement Crowd: Building the Internet Yellow Pages a Knowledge Graph for the InternetProceedings of the 2024 ACM on Internet Measurement Conference10.1145/3646547.3688444(183-198)Online publication date: 4-Nov-2024
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Index Terms

Destination Unreachable: Characterizing Internet Outages and Shutdowns
1. Networks
  1. Network services
    1. Network monitoring
  2. Network types
    1. Public Internet

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cover image ACM Conferences

ACM SIGCOMM '23: Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2023 Conference

September 2023

1217 pages

ISBN:9798400702365

DOI:10.1145/3603269

Chairs:
Henning Schulzrinne,
Vishal Misra,
Program Chairs:
Eddie Kohler,
David Maltz

Copyright © 2023 Owner/Author(s).

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs International 4.0 License.

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Published: 01 September 2023

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Cited By

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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3651890.3672218
Wu WBischof ZTestart CDainotti AVallina-Rodríguez NSuarez-Tángil GLevin DPelsser C(2024)Poster: Enhancing Internet Disruption Investigation via Path MonitoringProceedings of the 2024 ACM on Internet Measurement Conference10.1145/3646547.3689675(777-778)Online publication date: 4-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3646547.3689675
Fontugne RTashiro MSommese RJonker MBischof ZAben EVallina-Rodríguez NSuarez-Tángil GLevin DPelsser C(2024)The Wisdom of the Measurement Crowd: Building the Internet Yellow Pages a Knowledge Graph for the InternetProceedings of the 2024 ACM on Internet Measurement Conference10.1145/3646547.3688444(183-198)Online publication date: 4-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3646547.3688444
Salamatian LArdi CGiotsas VCalder MKatz-Bassett EArnold TVallina-Rodríguez NSuarez-Tángil GLevin DPelsser C(2024)What's in the Dataset? Unboxing the APNIC per AS User Population DatasetProceedings of the 2024 ACM on Internet Measurement Conference10.1145/3646547.3688411(165-182)Online publication date: 4-Nov-2024
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Guntrum L(2024)Keyboard Fighters: The Use of ICTs by Activists in Times of Military Coup in MyanmarProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642279(1-19)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
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