Business, Technology and Society, Weird

Weird Internet Issue

13 Comments

My desktop has quit communicating with Slack (slack.com). I can access it from a laptop, but not from my desktop. It acts like a DNS issue, but I can ping everything except it. It just started doing this a couple hours ago, and I didn’t change anything. Any ideas?

[Update a while later]

[root@localhost ~]

# ping slack.com
PING slack.com (54.87.197.95) 56(84) bytes of data.
^C
— slack.com ping statistics —
14 packets transmitted, 0 received, 100% packet loss, time 13292ms

Same thing happens when I ping the address directly. So it’s not a DNS issue. Very strange that I can get to it from the Windows laptop, but not the Linux desktop.

[Update late afternoon]

It’s back up. I guess I was one of the one percent.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Aaaaaaand it’s down again. At least now I know there’s nothing I can do about it, and no point in wasting time trying to figure it out. I just have to hope that they’ll get it sorted.

13 thoughts on “Weird Internet Issue”

      1. They’re still reporting an outage as of a few minutes ago (posting copy here):
        ______
        We’re seeing some signs of improvement, and reloading Slack (Ctrl/Command + R) may allow Slack to load again. The issue is not resolved for everyone, however, and we’ll be back again once we have another update to share.

        Note: We’ve edited the title of this incident to accurately reflect the scope of this issue.

        Sep 30, 3:30 PM MDT
        ______

  3. I’m having weird internet issues today too. I keep getting “untrusted connection” at sites that use HTTPS, like Wikipedia. Also, images don’t load on Fox News, etc.

    My guess is it’s an internet issue of some sort related to site certificates, though it seems fairly widespread.

    1. Rand, just in case your problem is related to mine (some kind of certificate issue) here’s an easy test; set your system clock to September 29th and try again.

      When I did that, everything worked again. I think this has something to do with a major certification provider having their certificate expire on the 30th, but I’m not sure yet.

    2. And another update; before resetting my clock, I tried the usual, like clearing out caches (including the certificate cache) but it didn’t solve the problem; most sites using https were unreachable.

      Rolling the system clock back a day fixed the problem, but I just reset it back to correct time and the problem is still fixed. I do not understand why this worked, but it worked (on my system at least).

  5. That was absolutely the problem, and your comment helped me narrow it down. (thank you!!!)

    It’s a certificate bug; on some systems (and in my case, on all three systems I have, one of which has three browsers) it prevented contact with some HTTPS sites, due to that expired DST Root CA X3.
    Wikipedia was one such site.
    Deleting the expired cert didn’t work. Rolling back the clock did – sometimes.

    What did work (on all systems) was downloading and installing 3 new certificates. Firefox (but not the chromium based browsers) also required installing the new certs in it.

    This article explains what’s going on, and also provides links to the needed certs. AND, pay careful attention to the possible need to delete that old cert.

    https://www.stephenwagner.com/2021/09/30/sophos-dst-root-ca-x3-expiration-problems-fix/

    Note: I did the install with the systems disconnected from the internet, because in Firefox (two different versions) it kept re-installing an older cert. Doing the install with it disconnected worked for me.

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