It’s a beautiful screw up, done in such immaculate fashion that you almost couldn’t make it worse on purpose. Like a disgruntled employee looking to cause as much damage as possible on the way out almost couldn’t do better.
I will be fascinated to read an in-depth analysis someday for how the hell something like this could happen. I would not be sad if this outage is lengthy or permanent, though I know it won’t be, but I wonder how vulnerable the rest of the internet is. Maybe this is like where you punch through the dry-wall and discover that your house is mostly held up by termites and dry-rot.
I heard people saying that Facebook DNS registrations disappeared, that their entire host of BGP servers just vanished (thus cutting out nearly all routes to their servers)… hard to know what’s true and what’s not, but it makes one wonder if this is all a big accident, or an orchestrated attack.
It is a tossup although I usually go with “Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence.” It has been my goto explanation ever since I brought my entire application support team in early to support a major system implementation only to send them all home when the database conversion had to be backed out because the conversion team had converted test data instead if the real thing.