Internet Outage News: How a Small Mix-Up Shut Down Internet Access to Parts of the U.S.
On Monday, Nov. 6, Internet users across the U.S. began to experience issues with their connection, with some reporting slow, intermittent service while others had their access interrupted entirely. The bulk of the reports were seen about 1 p.m. EST.
Comcast's XFINITY users were the worst-hit by the outage, but the issue also caused headaches for other companies including Spectrum, Verizon, Cox and RCN all over the U.S.
The website Down Detector's online issue map started lighting up as reports started to pour in from users in both East and West Coasts, as well as large regions of the Mid-West and the Atlantic seaboard, according to ZDNet.
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By around noon, Comcast had to announce something. The network provider posted on Twitter that they were aware of the issue. "Some customers are having issues with their XFINITY Internet service. We apologize & appreciate your patience while we work to fix," Comcast wrote in their notification.
The fault, it turned out, originated from the Level 3 Chicago node, a part of the Internet's backbone infrastructure. Level 3, now a part of CenturyLink, is a tier one internet service provider that farms out their bandwidth to consumer service providers like Comcast and other telcos.
The whole fiasco was apparently a result of an error on the part of the Level 3 team and was fixed in about an hour and a half since they were able to identify the issue. "Our network experienced a service disruption affecting some customers with IP-based services," the company said.
"The disruption was caused by a configuration error," a Level 3 representative admitted in a statement relayed to Wired. This simple error is also known as a "route leak," as Roland Dobbins, principal engineer for network-security firm Arbor Networks, described it.
This "route leak" caused Internet traffic in the country to become tangled up due to routing plants that did not work out very well. "Folks are looking to tweak routing policies, and make mistakes," Dobbins noted.
