All the internet(s) are down.

[NYJimbo]

First time experience for me:

About an hour ago our internet access went down, wired and wifi down. Router showed the link was up but "internet access" was down. Ok, no big deal we have tons of hot spots all around here.

Our provider is Verizon, so I pulled out a laptop and tried to hop onto Optimum Online's hotspot. Can't connect, do not get the Optimum login requirement that should come up regardless of site you go to. Weird. Tried to use a few routers near me that are not secured, same thing. Connects but nothing else. I then tried to get into Timewarners local hot spot. Same thing. So I decided to wait.

About 20 minutes later I remembered the hipster coffee shop 1/2 mile down the road has their own wifi so I grabbed a tablet and took a walk down to it. Ordered a big hazelnut coffee and blueberry muffin and tried their hotspot. Nothing.

I said out loud to the guy behind the counter "Is your wifi down?" and he says "Yeah went down about 20 minutes ago". A guy sitting at a table says "I cant get onto any other network either".

So I walk back to my shop and 10-15 minutes later my network comes back up.I try the insecure routers near me and they all work. I try the other different provider WIFI password protected hotspots and now they come up with their normal "login and password" required to use them web pages (optonline, etc).

I don't recall ever seeing this before. All the links were up but nothing was pushing protocol, even though they are different pipes going back to different locations and hotspots are not all on the same fiber. Every time I have seen this sort of thing its been isolated to either a router or a provider. This seemed to affect ALL providers at the same time. I could understand this if we were in the sticks, but central Nassau County is very urban for a suburb. Even after Hurricane Sandy we could get onto some networks but not others. I wonder what went down today ?

 

[lcoughey]

Perhaps the NSA needed to reboot their snooping systems and disabled the internet just to make sure that they don't miss anything exciting.

 

[SilverLeaf]

First time experience for me:

About an hour ago our internet access went down, wired and wifi down. Router showed the link was up but "internet access" was down. Ok, no big deal we have tons of hot spots all around here.

Our provider is Verizon, so I pulled out a laptop and tried to hop onto Optimum Online's hotspot. Can't connect, do not get the Optimum login requirement that should come up regardless of site you go to. Weird. Tried to use a few routers near me that are not secured, same thing. Connects but nothing else. I then tried to get into Timewarners local hot spot. Same thing. So I decided to wait.

About 20 minutes later I remembered the hipster coffee shop 1/2 mile down the road has their own wifi so I grabbed a tablet and took a walk down to it. Ordered a big hazelnut coffee and blueberry muffin and tried their hotspot. Nothing.

I said out loud to the guy behind the counter "Is your wifi down?" and he says "Yeah went down about 20 minutes ago". A guy sitting at a table says "I cant get onto any other network either".

So I walk back to my shop and 10-15 minutes later my network comes back up.I try the insecure routers near me and they all work. I try the other different provider WIFI password protected hotspots and now they come up with their normal "login and password" required to use them web pages (optonline, etc).

I don't recall ever seeing this before. All the links were up but nothing was pushing protocol, even though they are different pipes going back to different locations and hotspots are not all on the same fiber. Every time I have seen this sort of thing its been isolated to either a router or a provider. This seemed to affect ALL providers at the same time. I could understand this if we were in the sticks, but central Nassau County is very urban for a suburb. Even after Hurricane Sandy we could get onto some networks but not others. I wonder what went down today ?

It sounds like there was an upstream interruption at some common point. Maybe all of the providers that you tried share a common data path. Perhaps they all lease the same fiber for a portion of their network,and there was a disruption at a Tier 2 transit point.

 

[nlinecomputers]

You'd be surprised how centralized some of the major trunk lines are. About 6 years ago some farmer with a backhoe killed all communcations links by cutting one fiberoptic trunk line.

 

[Nerm]

Kinda sounds like a Jr. Engineer got to play with live BGP for the first time lol.

 

[NYJimbo]

You'd be surprised how centralized some of the major trunk lines are. About 6 years ago some farmer with a backhoe killed all communcations links by cutting one fiberoptic trunk line.

It's possible they are cutting costs and aggregating their networks or backbones or something. I know that Optimum now has an "agreement" with TimeWarner that you can use their wifi with your optonline login. Maybe they are all on reduced redundancy because its too expensive for them all to have so many backbone connections on their own.. If this is true then its only going to get worse in the future.

 

[nlinecomputers]

May have been a perfect storm of problems. The line that got cut here was supposed to switch to backups and didn't. Might have been something similar and somebody had to manually switch over to other lines. We were down with no phone service or cable for the half the town for nearly 6 hours and a couple of days to get full service speeds back.

 

[ohio_grad_06]

Yes, I remember a few years back out here, someone cut an ATT fiber line, knocked down internet and phone for the whole town I think lol.

 

[frederick]

I know here Cox uses a spanning tree like network, that allows for a lot of self healing. Its great because outages aee kept to a minimum, and isolated. They still have whole city outages, but rare. Since ive been here there has only been 1.