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Pastimes : Where the GIT's are going -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ish who wrote (23004)	7/19/2001 10:25:07 PM
From: KLP	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 225578

Mine was too for awhile this AM....maybe this is the reason: Thursday July 19 6:59 PM ET Tunnel Fire Slows Internet Service By STEPHEN MANNING, AP Business Writer LANHAM, Md. (AP) - Derailed train cars burning in a Baltimore tunnel seriously damaged nearby fiber-optic cables, slowing Internet service and other communications traffic across the country. The fire caused major Internet slowdowns in the mid-Atlantic states, with the ripple effect carrying nationwide. Keynote Systems, a company measuring the performances of Web sites, said the delay experienced by Internet users was the worst it has ever seen. Fiber-optic cable for voice and data run through the tunnel and were damaged by the blaze and smoke that forced authorities to close downtown Baltimore on Wednesday night. Telecommunications companies WorldCom, PSINet, and AboveNet all reported problems with service, but they had not yet measured the extent of the damage to cables or the number of customers affected. The fire continued to burn Thursday, preventing WorldCom technicians from repairing damaged cable, company spokeswoman Jennifer Baker said. Crews worked overnight to reroute traffic to other cables and restored service to most customers by Thursday afternoon, Baker said. ``For nearly three hours today we were totally cut off, our Web page was down and we had no e-mail,'' said Dan Johnson, president of DWJ Television in Ridgewood, N.J. The film production company had some service restored by mid-afternoon, but its Web site still was offline. Telephone service to western Maryland also was affected by the train wreck. A call center in Cumberland that handles campground reservations for the Michigan Department of Natural Resources was knocked off line. A Citicorp customer service center in Hagerstown lost two-thirds of its lines, said Phil Kelly, a company spokesman. AboveNet sent an e-mail message to customers telling them to expect delays while they rerouted data to other cables. A PSINet spokeswoman also said service would be affected by the fire. Keynote spokeswoman Mary Lindsay said the cable cuts affected service throughout the country. ``What we're seeing is a problem in the handshake between the backbones which serve as the Internet's infrastructure,'' she said. ``These backbone providers hand off traffic to travel between them across the country.'' The backbone networks provide a skeleton for the Internet, carrying messages between major cities and across oceans. Keystone monitors recorded major delays handing off traffic from one backbone carrier to another. Keynote reported huge slowdowns in Seattle and Los Angeles that also may be attributed to the train wreck. The fact that a single fire could cause such an Internet blip shows just how connected the global network is. When an Internet provider has problems ``peering'' - or handing off traffic to other Internet providers like passing a note down a chain - people all over the world can feel its effects. ``It's more of a living thing,'' Keynote's Eric Siegel said of the Internet. ``It's controlled by a couple of dozen guys in each major Internet provider. There's no central control. If one of them does something, its effects propagate outwards.''