teh blog of Jim

At approximately 2:00AM Eastern Daylights Savings time on October 21st 2005, The Internet effectively shut down. This was caused when Level3 Communications’s Teir-1 network went dark as a result of “severe routing problems” in a Chicago facility. Next, went Verio (a subsidiary of NTT Communications), as it was forced to compensate with the extra traffic that usually went through Level3’s network, causing a DDoS style effect. All of this while Level3 had pretty much cut the wire to Cogent (another Teir-1 ISP) over anti-competitive practices, or a scheduled router upgrade had been botched, the actual cause is not known.

With the Internet Sliced into 4 very equally-sized pieces, email to and from someone on your own ISP was almost impossible and trying to send email to someone with a different ISP left IT guys either laughing or crying.

This is how Hierarchal design of the internet is a bad thing.

-jX