Worth mentioning that this room takes a split from the main feed and is not in the path of traffic. Whatever is in this room could go down and it would not cause an outage.
Interestingly, fiber signals can be split passively[1] (without a transducer), which should be extremely reliable. No idea what technology this kind of application would use though.
How often does the entire west coast of the U.S. lose Internet connectivity to the entire continent of Asia? That gives you a constraint on how often that type of failure actually occurs.
In the context of arbitrary line-level traffic, sure. But we're talking about robust reverse proxies here if this _is_ what's going on, again, not a fiber tap inside a closet. In that case, there's no such thing as tee'ing to it.
Does the NSA even have the ability to monitor all AI traffic like this? Wouldn’t that require tons of data centers that there literally hasn’t been time to build yet? I really have no idea, maybe the asymmetry of the compute required to monitor is way lower than the compute required to serve inference?
"AI Traffic" is just traffic. If the infrastructure exists to monitor/buffer traffic (it does) then this can be monitored as well. Whether this hiccup was due to them hitting their limits briefly (or turning it on, or etc) who knows.
I bet it's even negligible traffic compared to e.g. Netflix or YouTube. Even a 'huge' context window is nothing compared to the random library of a basic Web page.
I dont think it requires a lot. I think of them as data hoarders more than anything else. It doesnt seem out of their capabilities to store a ton of chats. Maybe they're having scaling problems with the increased data rates they're hoarding and it led to an outage.
Transparency logs. It's mandatory for a cert to be in CT logs for browsers to trust it. Those are public, if this was happening, someone would have noticed already.
To give you an idea just how much phone traffic was being routed through that building, they had a major power failure at that site and it took down most of the north eastern US's phone network:
On September 17, 1991, management failure, power equipment failure, and human error combined to disable AT&T's central office switch at 33 Thomas. More than five million calls were blocked, and the Federal Aviation Administration private lines were also interrupted, disrupting air traffic control to 398 airports serving most of the northeastern United States.
