Wednesday, June 9, 2021

Well, I have an excuse this time. The internet’s been out all day. I didn’t say it was a good excuse, but it’s relevant to what we’re going to look at today. Trust me.

Sometime around 10:30 a.m. Country Standard Time, our newly installed fiber optic internet went down and wouldn’t come back up. We get ours through our power company, the Tombigbee Power & Electric Association. They put it in a few months ago and, for the most part, there’ve been no problems.

At first, I thought it was connected to all the rain we’ve been getting lately. I’ll get to that in a bit. However, it turns it was a problem with the server the provider used. I don’t have the details of the what’s and how’s, but we’ve been up since about 6 p.m. Apparently, we’re using their backup server and they’ll get all their wires uncrossed before the week’s out.

Now, that being said, I don’t know if this is related to the big outage the internet suffered Tuesday morning. If you were up in the wee hours towards 4 a.m. – like I usually am – a passel of websites were unresponsive. The reason is due to a problem at Fastly, a cloud service that handles a big chunk of the internet’s content delivery.

And why did it go down? You’ll love this, but it was due to a bad update the company issued on May 12. One customer had an issue with the update – just one – and it took down half the internet. I’m not exaggerating, a huge number of sites all across the board went down. Hulu, Amazon, Spotify, Reddit, Fandom (that’s how it affected me, looking up stuff for Dragon Age 2), Twitch, and Target among many others. One of those others was the United Kingdom’s governmental webpage which makes this a little less funny and a little more concerning. Websites went out all over the world, from America to Asia.

Fastly had things back up and running within an hour, but the situation shows what sort of rickety shape the internet is. Fastly is one of several companies that, more or less, provide the internet’s structure, one among many. When one goes down, which doesn’t happen often, the whole house of cards collapses and you’re left click “reload” to try to get Netflix going again. When added to the recent ransomware attack on the Colonial Pipeline, one of an increasing number (including seven in one hour), has exposed a serious security issue that needs to be dealt with as soon as possible.

Okay, back to the rain. We here in North Mississippi have been getting dumped on, and I’m not exaggerating. Since early Sunday morning, we’ve been getting a mess of rain, up to fifteen inches in some places. It’s been mostly rain, mind, and far as I can tell no tornado weather or bad wind.

But fifteen inches of rain in three days ain’t no joke. There’s been the occasional frog-drowning monsoon-type pounding but it’s been mostly an average pour. It’s just been nonstop. There have been little breaks here and there, like now for instance, but as soon as you get used to it, the whole mess starts up again.

The Tombigbee River spillway is up and Enon Creek is high, plus we woke up to two Itawamba County road workers sawing up some pine trees that fell across the road. Luckily, we’re on a hill. Some places haven’t caught the same break. Severe flooding has been reported in Saltillo, with residents having to leave their homes because the water was waist-high. Lots of folks have needed rescuing because of washouts. Lafayette County has had whole roads washed away. It doesn’t matter where you are, once the ground is soaked wet that water has to go somewhere.

Perhaps the most significant worry has been the struggle in Oxford to keep Lake Tam Levee from bursting through its dam. If the dam comes down, it will flood several residential areas such as the Gum Tree subdivision and neighborhoods along the College Hill Road area. Workers are pumping water as fast as they can and draining off the excess water. However, officials warn residents to be ready to get up and go. We’re not out of the woods yet, with more rain coming Thursday and possibly Friday. This weekend is supposed to be clear and hot, so hopefully we can dry up some.

In any event, stay safe and dry, neighbors, and if the officials tell you to pick up and go, do so.