Here’s an interesting memo from Marc Perkel. As far as I can tell nobody in the “big” media is on to this story.
The interesting situation I told you about yesterday is not resolved. The Internet itself is broken. It appears as of today that the Internet itself is now two separate networks and some parts of the Internet can not talk to other parts. This is not a temporary outage. A major communication company, Level 3 has cut all traffic with another major communication company Cogent Communications.
I’ll be surprised if someone isn’t in court today asking for an emergency injunction to get this fixed.
The bottom line is that for now people who get their service from providers using Level 3 can’t go to the web sites who get their service from Cogent and vice versa. This also affects peer to peer applications like Chat and some kinds of voice over IP connections between Level 3 and Cogent customers.
The decision to disconnect is that of Level 3. They are the ones who pulled the plug fracturing the internet. I send out an alert to 1200 newspapers last night to alert them to the story.
This fracture affects tens of millions of people directly and every internet user indirectly. It is going to disrupt email delivery in unpredictable ways. This is a very serious situation that is out of my control. For those customers of mine at the Electronic Frontier Foundation – I have reports that EFFs site is affected by this so if you want to file an emergency injunction – this is a good time to do it. There are national security implications here. The idea that some company can fragment the internet on a whim is scary. But there are no laws governing this – yet.
Computer Tyme Hosting gets it’s bandwidth from a mix of providers. That’s why I chose a data center (Nectartech) in the Market Post Tower building. For us – not all the protocols are cut off. So you can still ping the server and SSH and FTP upload to it. But the web interface (Port 80) is down for Level 3 customers. People who have Level 3 service can not access any of the web sites we host.
This, in fact, could be the beginning of the end for e-commerce.
related links:
Slashdot
As a Time Warner Cable customer, I can’t visit this website or Drudge without using a proxy server.
I thought that the original “Internet” as designed by DARPA, was designed so that single or multiple points of failure would not disrupt the ultimate delivery of data traffic. It was actually designed to survive nuclear war by having the routers try different paths in case the primary path was disrupted.
Something here doesn’t make sense. I can understand if clients of a specific company have trouble accessing or providing services on the Internet (Camcast’s crappy DNS is a good example), but this sounds very weird. Specially since there has been no news about it.
I thought that the original “Internet” as designed by DARPA, was designed so that single or multiple points of failure would not disrupt the ultimate delivery of data traffic.
Only if all of the surviving networks allow everyone else’s traffic to cross their networks.
DARPA’s plans depended on Patriotism. This is Capitalism (at its worst).
The internet has become so important for everyday life that this kind of nonesence should not be allowed. It is the equivolent of a power company, cuting off their grid from another power company over sometype of disagreement crippling everyone. I will imagine you will see some type of legislation coming out of this.
Now I can reach dvorak.org and all the other news sites I was blocked from. Does this make sense since those 2 companies are still feuding?
Interesting. I was wondering why I couldn’t access this site from work yesterday.
There is only disruption for customers of Level 3 or customers of Cogent who do not have sufficient connectivity (i.e., buying transit from somebody who is ultimately getting it from somebody other than Level 3 or Cogent.
I’m seeing no disruption, as my provider (Cox Communications) has connectivity directly with both Level 3 and Cogent. Ditto for people getting transit from Sprint, AT&T, MCI, Verio, etc.
Cogent already buys transit from other providers (like Verio), but they are filtering routes to Level 3 on those connections. If they remove those filters, all of their customers will be able to reach Level 3 again–but of course, they’ll have to pay money to their transit providers based on that bandwidth utilization, which they were getting for free when Level 3 allowed them a direct connection.
See my link for more info on what’s behind this. It’s incorrect to say that the Internet has been split into two parts.
I also am a TWC meber and couldnt get to your site at all yesterday. Hope this gets fixed up quickly. Even though it works now.
I think it’s interesting that this story took so long to break. At home I was unable to reach dvorak.org for the past day. It’ll be interesting to see how this all plays out. I think it was probably a poor move on L3’s part. While they’re within their rights it seems like shooting yourself in the foot to me. Jim Lippard may say that Cognet is not a Tier 1 provider because they buy some of their transit but the fact is they have a lot of customers. One source I read put Cogent’s share of Internet traffic at 12% and L3’s at 6%. If that’s the case this was a really dumb move on the part of L3. I have also heard that L3 has been trying this with other peers recently. Sounds like L3 is just trying to make cash grabs…
Could not acces your page as well as rederotica.org since monday just a few minutes ago rederotica.org came back , i’m guessing since earthlink (My ISP) Uses Level 3 that all of the pages that were blocked earler in the week are now unblocked
I was right, talk of new legislation to stop this nonesense in the future!
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1035_22-5891156.html?tag=zdfd.newsfeed
I must say I agree completly, it is nice to see people have blogs where they spread the same opinion you got.