Internet Outage Disrupts East Coast Traffic

Internet users from Brooklyn to Philadelphia suffered slow to nonexistent service Saturday after equipment at a New York-area network hub broke down, disrupting service for several hours.

A spokesman for the Internet service provider Level 3 Communications Inc. LVLT +0.25% said technicians were working quickly to fix the outage, which cascaded down to customers using Cablevision Systems Corp.'s CVC -0.45% Optimum service and Time Warner Cable Inc., TWC -0.36% among others.

"Maintaining a high-performing, efficient network for customers is our top priority," Level 3 spokesman Jon Paul McLeary said. "At this time, we do not have an estimated time when service will be restored."

Internet Outage Disrupts East Coast Traffic

Perhaps another kill switch test? I have never heard of entire regions going down like this. Maybe they have rerouted traffic in order to control regions better? In the old days you lost server farms and blocks of websites. Now we are losing regional connections?

That's cause in the "old days" they didn't run all of the internet traffic through a bottleneck in Utah...cough "NSA" cough

In my area over the last three weeks or so we have had 4 major
outages, supposedly they were line breaks, fiber optic but from
what i understand that's kind of a blanket statement they use often.

Two of the outages were about 16 hours, one was over 24, and
the other was about 20 split up into two segments, one of about
16 and then another of about 4.

What is fascinating, as i work at a place that offers free wifi internet
if you are here, is the utter indignation from customers, they behave as if
my facility ran the entire network backbone ourselves.....

They demand full refunds, partial refunds, give the most atrocious reviews
we have ever received online..... all the while we were in an even worse
position than they were, of course most businesses would be in the same boat.
All of our paperwork relies on a connection to a central server.

Also i would like to say, with an average of something like 96% up time,
i think most internet providers are doing their part, heck i cant think
of much on this planet that is 96% reliable.

Oh and the outages were wide spread, counties in KY, TN and IL were hit,
not sure of total but it had to be very large.

LOL I thought the topic was suggesting that an internet outage caused a vehicle traffic jam!! AHAHAHAHHA

reply to post by bloodreviara


I can't believe people would act like spoiled children over something you have no control over. Wait.. yeah, I guess I can.

They can cut it off on a whim now, and believe me its coming, coming soon!

reply to post by DaRAGE


Same here, I thought they were gonna say traffic lights run on internet signals or something lol.

reply to post by research3300




This is exactly whats happening

I know, what is wrong.

When you understand the way modern internet is routed you'll see that theres less actual fallover than there used to be so at one time if someone stuck a digger through a line from x to y it would fall over and use another route which might be slower but you'd still get your webpage perhaps 0.01 seconds later but in saving money these backup routes have either not been upgraded or even turned off and with less money being spent to maintain the infrastructure such as replacing parts like hot swap psu's on a big router they'll let it go until its down to the minimum before just replacing one of the failed parts to try and save a bit of cash, also most of these data centres are now ran lights out from a single command centre but if something really goes wrong they have to send someone to visit the site which could take a few hours to get there

reply to post by research3300

Is that ISP the same L-3 that is tied to the private defense contractor MPRI?

MPRI, the guys who trained and equipped the islamist extremists in Croatia that conducted one of the worst episodes of ethnic cleansing in our younger history?
The same guys who trained bosnian Mujahideen (linked to AQ btw) as a subcontractor for the Pentagon, who fought for the UCK in Kosovo?

And you trust those guys with your interwebz?!?! Please tell me I'm wrong...

***(loads of tinfoil recommended if you're heading down that hole!!)

ColCurious
reply to post by research3300

 

Is that ISP the same L-3 that is tied to the private defense contractor MPRI?

L-3 and Level 3 are not the same.
I worked for one and deal with the other on a weekly basis in my current job.

Do people here not realize things break? Spanning tree loops occur, hard drives fail, fiber gets cut, a contractor hits a power plug, a mem chip dies, the wrong cross connect gets pulled, ect....

I get it, this is a conspiracy site but what is much more likely..A network , data or voice, had a hardsoftwarehuman failure or the IllumiNSACIA tested their kill switch. Occam would say it's pretty much what gives IT folks their jobs vs something nefarious.

reply to post by research3300


Hmmm. Could a minor geomagnetic storm explain the outage? Perhaps bottlenecks are NOT a good idea?

Strongest solar flare in months unleashed by sun

An M2.8 class flare erupts from Sunspot AR1865 at 9:48 p.m. EDT on Tuesday in this still image taken from a video by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory.

The strongest solar flare in nearly two months erupted from the sun Tuesday, causing a minor geomagnetic storm as charged particles from the sun passed by the planet.

...Geomagnetic storms occur when solar particles interact with Earth's magnetic field. Powerful solar flares aimed directly at Earth can sometimes cause significant disruptions to satellites in space, and can knock out power grids and communications infrastructure on the ground.

reply to post by research3300


Interesting, I'm very near Allentown, Pa, which is smack dab between NY and Philly, PennTeleData is my isp (PTD) and was online using several different computers for several different reasons (anywhere from Netflix to a few online games (Wizard101, DarkSpace and MineCraft)) at the same time from around 7:00pm to after 1:00am this morning, and didn't notice any troubles.
And, I do believe, my isp uses Level 3 as well. Hmm.

snrRog

I am in North Carolina and am on Windstream. My Internet went out Saturday. My cell phone oddly enough also went out at the same time. They were out for about half an hour. I get both back at about the same time. All I could get when I tried to get on line was SERVER NOT FOUND. My cell dropped from 3 bars to none. My cell has a little square box that shows the letter "G" in it when my phone has a GPS lock (no way to turn this off). Not only did the cell lose the tower but it lost GPS lock as well. I wonder if this was because of solar flares that I have been hearing about a lot in the past few days.

reply to post by bloodreviara


internet access is like CRACK dude.

I can't imagine the horror of a day with no access.. Kids can't access Netflix or play wii online, can't make sure S hasn't HTF,..

I was hanging out in the lobby at a resort in flagstaff and the wifi was down, man its all true. People were demanding their ROOM for FREE, else they were going to check out of the hotel..

I'm down here in south jersey, we lost internet for about 3 hours yesterday. I tried all the usual methods of bringing it back up with no luck......thanks op. S&f for bringing this to my attention. I didn't know it was so widespread.....

Oh, more on topic. The internet up in my area has been fine. No one on my list from NS or NB have had any problems outside of the normal #ty internet lol. Problems didn't make it this far north I guess.

Whats up with all the critical computer failures all of the sudden?

Ebt, internet all within the span of a week.

Hmmmm.

Somethings fishy. ..

Whats next banking/wallstreet computer failures?

coldkidc
That's cause in the "old days" they didn't run all of the internet traffic through a bottleneck in Utah...cough "NSA" cough

Not everything is a conspiracy, but I thought one of the design parameters of the internet was that if a line break occurred, it could route traffic around it? You could download a file in the past and different packets of data for the file would take different routes to get to you.

So if a single line break shuts down traffic, and it isn't just rerouted, something doesn't quite add up, so you then really have to wonder why? It could be one of the the NSA supersnooper data collection terminals that went down, and they didn't just route around it because they weren't allowed or something? Maybe that's not what happened, but it's not unreasonable speculation given this slide published in the Washington Post (See Upstream Data Collection):

www.washingtonpost.com...


They apparently pull data off the internet backbone and send it to Utah, rather than routing all traffic through Utah.