Yesterday's surfing disruption down to a cable failure

by Suw on November 26, 2003

You may or may not have noticed quite a bit of disruption on the internet yesterday, with email going all up the swanny and normally reliable websites appearing to just vanish into the ether never to be seen again. (Well, not until after I'd gone to bed, anyway.) Apparently, it was down to a major failure in one of the key communications links between the United States and Europe.

I really rather liked this paragraph from that article:

Vanessa Evans, of LINX, the London Internet Exchange, which carries nearly all U.K. Internet traffic and over half of Europe's Internet traffic, said she saw a drop in traffic of around 2 gigabits per second. At its peak, LINX sees 32 gigabits of data every second. She added that the Internet was not broken, as traffic was rerouted through other networks.

No, no, no, of course the internet wasn't broken. It just wasn't working.

A visitor November 26, 2003 at 10:57 pm

I noticed – I was swearing at NTL. I changed my proxy server on several occasions and ended up going to bed late 'cos everything took hours. I'm glad it wasn't just me…

Dio

Suw November 27, 2003 at 8:14 am

Seems like it's still not 100% fixed – this morning I can get into some web sites but not others, and I can't get my mail either. Pfft. When did I get so dependant on the net?!

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