Ben's Bits

A few weeks ago Cogent and Level3 (two tier one ISPs) had a business dispute and "depeered" causing a problem preventing many people from getting to certain websites for about a week. Last week Level3 had some more issues with a bad router upgrade that essentially removed them (and all their customers) from the internet for about 4 hours (although it was during the middle of the night in the United States).

Two sites I like to visit to check on internet-wide problems are the Internet Traffic Report and the Internet Health Report. ITR gives you a good geographic overview of packet loss on the internet and IHR gives you delay and availibility statistics between each of the tier one carriers.

Another great resource is the North American Network Operator's Group which has a mailing list where major internet service providers discuss things like outages. You can see an example of the discussion that took place last week on this page and the first mention of a problem in this message.