By Athima Chansanchai
For a few moments yesterday, those who live some aspect of their lives online ? which is to say, a lot of people???might have felt like the ground beneath them fall away, as there were brief, widespread Internet outages that apparently affected much of North America.
Again, it wasn't long ? seconds for some, such as customers plugged into the Time Warner Cable Network, for others it may have been hours ? but it was just a little bit alarming that knocking out one pivotal network, Level3, could have such far reaching consequences.
A bug appeared during a firmware update that reset the network's Juniper routers, which caused outages throughout all the other networks that link back to it. These include Time Warner, RCN, BlackBerry and others, according to The Atlantic Wire.
The problem and its resolution seemed to span about an entire workday, as Level3 had this to say at about 5 p.m. yesterday, as reported by ZDNet UK:
"Shortly after 9 am ET today, Level 3's network experienced several outages across North America and Europe relating to some of the routers on our network," the company said. "Our technicians worked quickly to bring systems back online. At this time, all connection issues have been resolved, and we are working hard with our equipment vendors to determine the exact cause of the outage and ensure all systems are stable."
To put it in some perspective, this wasn't an isolated event.
Host Virtual called it a "global failure" since they consider Level3 a "major transit provider" and reported other ISPs with Juniper issues yesterday. They?linked to the usual mea culpa, this time issued by?Mark Bauhaus, Juniper executive vice president of services, support and operations: "This morning, Juniper learned of a Border Gateway Protocol edge router issue that affected a small percentage of customers.?A software fix is available, and we?ve been working with our customers to immediately deploy the fix."
As is common practice nowadays when something goes wrong with technology, Time Warner customers took to Twitter to blow off steam about the outage, with the usual colorful language describing their agony and how bad the service is, etc.
We saw some outages hit major sites early in October, and while it seems that groups like Anonymous are usually the first suspects in such things, it did not unravel that way this time. Panic did not overwhelm the Web, and life seemed to go on for most people without a hitch. But for the rest who suffered some kind of withdrawal: It's ok now.
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