If you’ve been having trouble accessing some of the web’s most popular sites this morning, you aren’t alone – reports have been pouring in that major sites like Amazon, CNN, and ESPN have been having sporadic outages in some areas across the United States. The problem seems to be stemming from an issue with Level 3 Communications, which operates one of the largest internet backbones in the world.
According to InternetPulse, the provider has been showing severe latency times, and a number of other sites have confirmed that Level3 is the source of the issue.
Some of the affected sites are beginning to write blog posts explaining their outages to users (here are posts from SliceHost and Posterous). It looks like some of the issues are being resolved, but some sites are still having problems.
We should also note that AT&T customers have been reporting widespread outages in some regions. We’re trying to find out if the two outages are related.
Update, 11:45 AM PST: Level3 technical support technician Eunice Morales says that all of the issues have been resolved, and that the problems originated from Washington, DC, Chicago, Spain, and Germany. She also says that the problems with AT&T could possibly be related to the Level3 issues.
call a plumber, a good one can fix anything.
UnclogDrain.com – line clear
Thanks – good to know – and yes, I had problems with Facebook this morning and others with Google – so this is good information.
Doesn’t that sorta suggest that one major carrier has a problem, it can ripple all over the web and affect commerce a great deal more than we suspect.
Just a thought.
Thanks for the confirmation.
I had trouble here (South of Boston), with Google, Amazon S3, content, Twitter (Google Apps & analytics) this AM.
Where is Joe the Plummer when you need him? Didn’t he get an agent?
More like Super Mario as out of Joe the plumbers league!
Ah the holidays. I envision a large network control console with Tim the Intern sitting there. Before going on holiday, the engineers said “Now Tim, call us if any lights turn red…”
He did, and they are fixing the problem remotely while home drinking spiked eggnog and watching reruns of Robot Chicken.
Ok, so I made all of this up. But think careful about how much truth there is to this…
Where is Joe the Plumber when you need him? Didn’t he get an agent?
The internet is imploding
Someone should invent a way to use more than one internet service provider. Then there might be a way to detect problems in a network and choose another one based on its ability to get the traffic where it’s going. I bet you could make a lot of money with something like that.
Yeah they already do that in sweden. and you can ramp up the download speeds you want right up to 100mbit.
BGP (Border Gateway Patrol) already does what you are asking about. The problem is that not everyone has implemented it.
If your willing to shell out the money, most advanced routers and firewalls have the capability to do this right out of the box.
Yay load balancing.
These exists, here is one of what I’m sure are several.
http://www.f5.c...controller.html
The original design of the Internet was meant to route around a clog. Original designed for the military (darpanet) and it had to continue working even if pieces were taken out.
Seems its not quite operating that way anymore.
I don’t think there is enough excess routing capacity for backbones to be rerouted smoothly.
Sure there is, it’s just that the peering policies of the major NSPs serve to limit the routing ecology.
Um, no, that was Usenet. The Internet was never given the same design robustness to work around clogs that Usenet has, as Usenet was designed to continue working smoothly even if most of the major hubs were hit with nuclear strikes. The Internet has nothing to do with DARPANet, either.
This kind of problem can be solved with a good, long snake. Anyone?
DoD attack maybe? hummm…..
DoD attack maybe? hummm…..
You meant DOS (denial of service), right?
whats DoD?
http://groups.im/
Yeh, i was typing to fast.. lol
A typical DoS wouldn’t suffice for such an outage. It would have to be a DDoS where mutliple zombie computers flooded the network. Mmmrrrrr biiiits!!!!
my decision to dust off the pencil, legal pad, & grid paper couldn’t have come at a more appropriate time. #prototyping #writing
the world is ending…ijustine…want to make out…
I was wondering why Toms Hardware was off and on all morning o_O
hmmm… what happens when a backbone provider turns belly-up?
The senate votes on a bailout package and the govt buys into the internet.
Noticed this earlier Last.fm and Amazon. Also, my iPhone EDGE connection has been kaput since before noon CST. Anyone else having iPhone trouble?
Boy Genius has more on iPhones outages: http://tinyurl.com/7bpk8p
Yea, i was having all sorts of problems downloading some iPhone Apps today.
http://www.redr.../top-paid-apps/
I’ve had problems accessing dell.com today. Not sure it was related.
Sounds like it’s all for the best, then.
Not sure if this is related but my Charter Communications cable Internet connection has been down all day here in south Georgia. m
I’m in Michigan and it appears the entire state does not have AT&T cell phone. It’s 4:30pm EST as I write this.
i noticed google was affected as well….
I think you missed something when you stole that image for the article
“Copyright © 2008 Keynote Systems, Inc. All rights reserved”
Yay, Eunice! (never, EVER thought i’d utter that particular phrase…)
was a cluster%^$# this morning
what’s being done to prevent this from happening again?
Good to know. I have been having problems accessing Yahoo lately. See the link http://princesi.../is-yahoo-down/
Well, just call Joe-the-Plumber, he can probably fix it.
wow it looks straight as a nosepipe out of my limo car in london.
I just hope the Internet upgrades from the Linksys WRT54G that’s running everything now.
tube can be clogged ,which is tick?
just a little bit of problem in pipe ..
and people already started to gossip about end of the world !
Amazing.
All I’m gonna say is one thing and one thing only…. ZOMBIES!
nice
http://www.yout...h?v=763vmCrRBDg
Wow, OK someone call the plumber!
Jess
http://www.onli...e-privacy.se.tc
Is there a big Star Trek convention going on or something?
lol. these comments were mostly entertaining with all the trolls but that takes the cake
dang that NSA – GET BACK TO WORK FOCKER’S!
Reading through these comments is truly a sad sight. The amount of people who have absolutely no idea what they are talking about on this particular subject is even more astounding.
I couldn’t agree more.
@James Marino – BGP does not equal Border Gateway Patrol…people should really know wtf they are talking about before opening their mouths. Nearly EVERYONE runs BGP, or Border Gateway Protocol. See below…
http://en.wikip...ia.org/wiki/Bgp. Being the Core protocol of the Internet I would suspect that anyone who has a connection to the Internet has it running somewhere, either at their provider, or on their edge by using more than one provider.
Interesting sites:
http://www.inte...aspx?Period=RH4
for AT&T
http://ipnetwor...rformance.shtml
Is global internet demand is actually outpacing the infrastructure that can support it, as suggested by this article last year:
http://www.neme...k_capacity_2010
Perhaps the global demand specifically for online video is throttling the internet as this piece in Oct suggests:
http://www.impa...e-the-internet/
Hope more governments of the world step up to take the fibre out of the private sector and subsidize it as a public service. We’d better get cracking…
It’s now Monday, 29th and I still have painfully slow connections to certain parts of teh int0rwebz.
Apple’s iTunes (US) store for example, usually it takes me 5 minutes to download a 200 meg tv show – today it’s taking 30.
Amazon is still slow, as is the local(!) property website.
Connections to the UK and France seem fast as usual.
maybe LVLT management tried FLUSHING all those stock bonus’s down the Toilet????
Call Roto-Router,
That’s the name!
And away goes bandwidth,
Down the drain!
Tubes. . really? Hum. I guess Ted was right about that one.
I was wondering why Toms Hardware was off and on all morning o_O