Just before COVID, a random unidentifiable person reported that 1.1.1.1 saw 60Mb/s of ICMP echo traffic. When APNIC first experimented with making it a valid network almost a decade before that, it was being sent 50Mb/s of general IP traffic. Amusingly, a side-effect of what CloudFlare has done is that it has stopped all of that traffic leaving the edges of the Internet, and funnelling in to one big central place.
There are those who remember the risks of 'just use 1.1.1.1' and how the people who did that used be characterized as 'bad Internet citizens'. The ServerFault answer (q.v.) is from 2011.
* https://labs.ripe.net/author/franz/pollution-in-18/
Likely for good reason, even back then there would have bound to be lots of misconfigured endpoints trying to access 1.1.1.1, so just blocking it at the earliest point possible kept at lot of the annoyance away. Nowadays, it’s an anycast address, so it’s slightly less bad.
But for me, old habits die hard.
Pinging such an address is inherently a troublesome practice. This address, like many public DNS servers (resolvers as well as root and authoritative ones), uses "anycast" routing methodology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anycast
Pinging an anycast address will yield a cornucopia of different results. Of course, people who naïvely "ping" a recognizable or easy-to-type IPv4 address get what they deserve, especially when they enshrine it into software, unit tests, or the LLM coughs up such tokens on their behalf.
Fundamentally, the question is "what do you really want to test?" by pinging a particular IPv4? Do you want to test Layer 3 connectivity? Test your ISP's backbone and connectivity? Test only your upstream router? Test the existence of ICMP in your stack and theirs?
... the possibilities are endless. Your router can do anything. Ping zombo.com.
Pinging a domain name could fail for a variety of other reasons, particularly if it's not a reliable site. Cloudflare's business is being reliable; few sites would be a better choice.
But it’s a good “is traffic making it past my router with some semblance of connectivity” sanity check, and easier than finding the provider-side next hop address.
I don't think people are using `ping 1.1.1.1` as a stable API, rather as a yes/no test of the network segment that they control.
[0]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1672338/how-to-sleep-for...
The thread you linked to suggests 'timeout'[0]
[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administrat...
Look what happened because of what you did, what it led to! Two microservices are in critical condition and you're laughing. You're laughing.