On Wed, 19 Jun 1996 22:31:48 -0400 you said:
>Netcom had a complete shutdown from around 7pm EST on June 18 to about 3pm
>EST on June 19. According to Netcom's NOC, their network had a meltdown
>due to a peering problem which caused router overloads and route flapping.
>
>We are connected to Netcom's network over a T1 line and Netcom had been
>relatively stable till now.
>
>Netcom has a real problem with ix.netcom.com addresses and their mutation
>into ixNN.ix.netcom.com addresses where NN is an integer somewhere between
>1 and 20.
>
>Sanjay Kapur
FYI:
====================== Forwarded Message=============================== 74
Date: Wed, 19 Jun 1996 22:36:22 -0700
From: Joe Shea <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Netcom Outage: Should We Regulate?
To: Multiple recipients of list SPJ-L <[log in to unmask]>
+
American Reporter Correspondents
Hollywood, Calif.
6/20/96
outage
free
NETCOM OUTAGE HITS 400,000
by American Reporter Correspondents
SAN JOSE -- Netcom, one of the nation's largest online service
providers, was hit Tuesday and Wednesday with a complete network shutdown
which lasted almost 24 hours.
The service, which has over 400,000 customers, said the problem
was caused by "a disruption in the equipment used to route network
traffic, leading to a loss in connectivity to our points of presence."
Customers trying to log-in to the nationwide network were being
greeted with error messages or symptom descriptions, including
"Username/Password Incorrect," "Invalid Login," "Host Is Unavailable,"
"Call Failed," "Network Connection Lost - Exiting," and "Software Program
Hangs on Starting Session Screen."
Among the casualties of the outage were yesterday's editions of
The American Reporter, which had been updated to reflect new stories but
whose date had not yet been changed. In an editorial in today's editions,
American Reporter editor Joe Shea called for an exploration of provider
responsibilities and possible legislation to require them to report to a
Federal Internet Commission when large scale outages occur. Telephone
companies have a similar obligation to the Federal Communications
Commission.
"Congress could much more productively address abuses in the
access industry than try to censor its users," Shea said today.
The system-wide failure meant a huge volume of calls to the ISP,
whose phones displayed busy signals through most of the day. The American
Reporter reached a technical support engineer after 1:30 a.m. PDT (4:30
a.m. EDT) after a 26-minute wait. The engineer attributed the failure to
older equipment that had been stressed past its limits.
In a message on its home page, Netcom apologized to its customers
and said its engineers were reviewing the exact cause of the disruption.
-30-
* * *
THE BIG CHILL
by Joe Shea
American Reporter Editor-in-Chief
Netcom's nationwide outage, which officially began at 4 p.m. on
Tuesday and ended after noon on Wednesday, was really about a day in
length. We started getting dropped carriers before 10 a.m. more and more
frequently until we were locked out for good.
It's scary what can happen -- the economic and human consequences
of an outage on this scale. All 400,000-plus customers were affected.
Telephone companies are required by the FCC to regularly detail
such outages and explain what steps have been taken to fix them. Maybe
it's time to do the same thing for ISP's, since some of us have come to
depend on the Internet as much as others do on the telephone for
communication and work.
What do you think? Too much regulation already, or is time for
for an Federal Internet Commission?
-30-
Forwarded by --------------------------------------------------------
Elliott Parker BITNET: 3ZLUFUR@CMUVM
Journalism Dept. Internet: [log in to unmask]
Central Michigan University Compuserve: 70701,520
Mt. Pleasant, MI 48859 USA The WELL: [log in to unmask]
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