Nine countries without internet that never disconnected
7 hours ago
- IODA ping probes showed a simultaneous drop in responsive networks for nine countries, but other signals (BGP, Google traffic, telescope, aviation) remained stable, proving no real outage occurred.
- The drop was large and geographically coherent, but was a measurement artifact: networks stopped answering probes without disconnecting.
- Two system copies confirmed each other but both read the same IODA API, so they were not independent witnesses.
- BGP and telescope context signals were empty due to a timing issue in data storage; no alarms flagged the missing data.
- The issue was fixed by storing the last interval with data instead of expecting data at a specific time.
- Key lesson: a single signal crossing its threshold is only a fact about that signal, not about the world, and context signals are only useful if their storage is verified.