Major network outage in progress

21 October 2005

There is a major network outage in progress which is affecting internet backbones nationally. If you can read this, then it is apparently fixed or at least connectivity between you and us is temporarily working.

The incident began at 0200 EDT and has lasted at least 3 hours 20 minutes so far. Though our system is up and running and we have connectivity to our primary NAP in Washington DC, there are problems all over the country.

From time to time we start taking traffic, but significant portions of the internet are not accessable. In speaking to folks at other level one systems, they are experiencing the same issues -- some backbones are available while some are not.

This seems to be a significant problem with at least one of the major peering points that different internet providers use to communicate with each other. I am not able to ascertain the cause or full extent of the problem, though I suspect that with something this big you will probably hear about it on the news sometime today.

Most likely this is being caused by a failure in a major peering router, but it could be malicious in nature. Something similar happened about six years ago when MAE-EAST got hit with a huge denial of service attack that hosed pretty much everything from the Rockies eastward.

Let's hope it's just another faulty router.

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