Dear RIPE Team,
I am a Master's student at TU Delft, currently working on a tool that uses RIPE data to reliably detect network outages. While analyzing the measurements, I noticed what appears to be incorrect data being reported.
In particular, when counting the number of disconnected probes per country, I observed that many countries show a major outage on 23 April 2025, where nearly all probes were marked as disconnected for about an hour and a half before recovering.
For example, in Spain (ES):
2024-09-10 12:58:10 UTC – 16:37:15 UTC (Duration: 3:39:05, Peak offline probes: 154) Happened across many(40+) countries
2024-09-17 10:37:04 UTC – 12:50:56 UTC (Duration: 2:13:52, Peak offline probes: 129) Happened across many(40+) countries
2025-04-23 09:39:27 UTC – 11:11:59 UTC (Duration: 1:32:32, Peak offline probes: 210) Happened across many(90+) countries
The timing and duration of the April 23 outage are consistent across many countries. I’ve compiled more examples and raw data in this editable online notepad https://shrib.com/#Asa3ZLP3Xe.
It seems that a large portion of probes were marked as disconnected, even though the raw measurement data indicates they were still actively sending and receiving information.
It is important to note that such errors can be observed at other times for short periods of less than a minute - 20-05-2025, again across many countries.
I would greatly appreciate your clarification on a few points:
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What could explain this discrepancy? Is it a measurement issue or something related to RIPE’s internal systems?
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Are all measurements potentially affected by this? For example, measurement 10310, during an outage in NMK on May 18, some probes showed no responses for a 30-minute window(possibly still timing out). Similarly,
during the outage in Portugal on April 28, several probes had no data for multiple hours.
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How trustworthy are the results from the measurements?
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How long does it typically take for RIPE to detect and reflect a disconnected probe (or other events) in the API?
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Different requests to root measurements take the same time, even though one is requesting 30 minutes and another is requesting 4 minutes of data. Is the overhead on Ripe's side the reason for this?
Looking forward to your response!
Best regards,
Filip Dobrev
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