Having Net Problems ?

[GhostShip]

A mishap of some sort has damaged fibre optic cable links that one on the big backbone companies run.

http://blogs.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2005/11/major_internet_.html

Major Internet Backbone Goes Down

Cogent, which runs one of the major Internet backbone networks that handles long-haul Web traffic, is currently down after its fiber network was somehow cut in two different locations.
At the moment, even Cogent's homepage appears to be down from my location in Northern Virginia, serving up nothing more than a 404 File Not Found Error.

I spoke with Tecora Washington from Cogent. She confirmed that there were two fiber cuts; one that happened in New Orleans and a separate one in Washington, D.C. "This has effectively isolated the Southeast portion of Cogent's network."

Cogent spokesman Jeff Henricksen said in an e-mail that the network outage in New Orleans started this morning at 8:25 a.m. ET. He said work crews began repairs there at 1 p.m. ET today and that the company expects service to be restored within the next several hours. The Washington, D.C., outage began at 10:44 a.m. ET "after fiber there was damaged (crushed)." Henricksen said that damage should be repaired withing the next couple of hours.

This is creating some serious regional Internet traffic problems for some Internet service providers (ISPs), especially Comcast, according to individuals I spoke with today in Minnesota and in Pennsylvania. According to a thread over at Nanog, the outage is affecting ISPs from New York to Washington, D.C., and areas in the Southeast. The Internet Storm Center also is following this development. It is not clear when this problem will be fixed.

I'm not sure how often big fiber cuts like this happen at or near the same time on the same network at two major cities.

I hope your not one of those affected by this, but if you are it just means you may not get some sites and that some take a longer route to get to you for the next few hours.

[KM]

using BGP means that within a few minutes of something like that most traffic would have simply started routing around the problem using alternate routes, however cognent is known for the fact that it provides cheap (as in price, as well as quality) transit so certain cheap ISPs almost entirely use cognent or at least use cognent for a large portion of their bandwidth, either by overiding the BGP routing for force traffic to go over cognent to save money (rather than letting it take the quickest route) or in some cases they simply don't have enough alternate bandwidth to cope if they lose the cognent connections.

With any luck those ISPs will be effected enough by this outage that they will revise their ideas and start using BGP properly with multiple transit providers, although the sorts of ISPs that use cognent like that probably care more about price than reliability so probably won't change anything... but users on those ISPs can hope at least...