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The Internet

UUNET/WorldCom Backbone Diffiiculties 426

Posted by timothy from the wrong-button-wrong-button dept.
FearlessFritz writes "UUnet seems to be having a bad time recently. Several sites in the SouthEast of the US have been slow or down. Here is Worldcom's quote from their web page: 'WorldCom is currently experiencing an interruption of service in various hubs in the U.S. We are working to restore a routing anomaly, and making necessary progress toward resolving this disruption in service.' There are several rumors abounding, but the best is that they performed a hardware upgrade that failed. Is anyone outside of the Southeastern U.S. experiencing the effects of this outage? (I am peered to several providers so I can post!)"
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UUNET/WorldCom Backbone Diffiiculties More

UUNET/WorldCom Backbone Diffiiculties

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  • Please give them some time. (Score:3, Funny)

    by DAldredge ( 2353 ) <SlashdotEmail@GMail.Com> on Thursday October 03, 2002 @02:19PM (#4382689) Journal
    It will take a while for the 3 network techs that havent' been fired yet some time to fix this.

  • a voice from the wilderness: (Score:3, Funny)

    by budalite ( 454527 ) on Thursday October 03, 2002 @02:20PM (#4382704)
    (the voice from the movie WarGame after the first wave of Russian missile launches hit:) "We're still here!"

  • Upper Midwest problems (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 03, 2002 @02:20PM (#4382708)
    I have had very slow internet access most of the day in the upper midwest. The problem started at about 8:15 CT this morning.
    • Here's the alert propagating through our datacenter (San Diego, CA):

      "10/3/2002 11:50:22 AM
      OPEN - Alert - The UUNET Network outage is still outstanding. Problems are spreading from the East coast, westward. There are no indications of when the issue will be resolved. Currently the only problems [company name] is having is the degradation of connectivity to overseas [company name] sites as well as partners who do no have a backup ISP. Next update when the issue is resolved."

  • Northern Va is bad (at least for me) (Score:3, Informative)

    by dormat ( 155823 ) on Thursday October 03, 2002 @02:21PM (#4382716) Homepage
    Im in Alexandria, VA, and I've had horrible service all day long. I could get local sites, but nothing far away. Pinging slashdot wont even work half the time :(. And no google....

  • Hurricane(s) ? (Score:5, Funny)

    by simetra ( 155655 ) on Thursday October 03, 2002 @02:21PM (#4382721) Homepage Journal
    Maybe the recent hurricanes knocked over the trailer containing the routers.
    • Many of you laugh, but I know of a major business here on the Mississippi Gulf Coast that housed all of its IT department in a trailer outside of the company building. Had cable run and everything. It was kinda of creepy.

  • DC area (Score:3, Informative)

    by GweeDo ( 127172 ) on Thursday October 03, 2002 @02:22PM (#4382725) Homepage
    I can verify this issue. I work for a company out of the DC area and our data lines are provided by UUNet. I live in Kansas though and do all my work via SSH to the servers in DC. This morning my SSH sessions would randomly seem to hang. After a bit of investigation I started noticing it was taking like 600ms per hop once I got to the UUNet network. So that is North-East there.

  • Roll call (Score:5, Funny)

    by Dannon ( 142147 ) on Thursday October 03, 2002 @02:22PM (#4382726) Journal
    If you're not here, raise your hand! If you can't get online, send an e-mail to the network admin!
  • wondering why it took so long to see posts, and then realized, everyone must be on UUNET and can't race for f.p.
  • Has been pretty spotty. Times inside of Worldcom's network have been pretty slick across the country (15ms trip time from Cleveland to most anywhere), however almost anything that goes over to a different provider seems to have some pretty horrific lag times (at least a second or two).

  • 1997 or 1998 (Score:3, Insightful)

    by vluther ( 5638 ) <vid@lutGINSBERGher.io minus poet> on Thursday October 03, 2002 @02:23PM (#4382735) Homepage Journal
    wasn't MCI/Worldcom/C&W involved in lawsuit a few yrs ago for similar problems, but they went on for 3 days ?.. back then they got sued for loss of business, imagine whats gonna happen now.

    You would think they would have learn't. But they're still hiding information from people.. great. Maybe it's gone with the 6 billion dollars...
    • I was thinking as I was stuck in traffic on the way to work ... how long until someone has a wreck on the interstate, mangles traffic and what was normally a 20 minute commute took 70 minutes.

      And how long until that person gets sued by someone who was late for a meeting and lost a contract or something?

      The suit you mention is similar, except that the companies were probably paying them for service.

      • Re:1997 or 1998 (Score:2, Interesting)

        by handorf ( 29768 )
        If the accident is due to the person
        1) Talking on the cellphone
        2) Makeup/hair
        3) Reading or watching movies (don't laugh, I regularly get passed by a guy with a laptop on his dashboard watching DVDs. And I already drive way faster than I should) or even fiddling with the radio
        4) Any other non-driving activity

        Yes, they should be sued. I may be biased because I already have a 1 hour each way commute, but string the fsckers up!
  • some packets were lost today across the world in various network transactions.

  • Liars. (Score:2, Funny)

    by viper21 ( 16860 )
    They're just embarassed because they can't figure out how to get CowboyNeal to get down off of their router.

    -S

  • normal. (Score:5, Funny)

    by tid242 ( 540756 ) on Thursday October 03, 2002 @02:24PM (#4382754) Homepage
    Dialup: Normal
    Hub: Normal
    Outages: Normal

    this is from their network status page, i try to abstain from being a smart-ass but outages are normal?

    -tid242

    • Obviously, their definition of "Normal" must be "SNAFU":

      Situation Normal, All F*ed Up

    • Re:normal. (Score:3, Funny)

      by schon ( 31600 )
      i try to abstain from being a smart-ass but outages are normal?

      Well, this is Worldcom :o)
    • You want http://www1.worldcom.com/us/tools/noc/status.xml [worldcom.com]

      News Performance: Normal
      DNS Service: Normal
      Backbone: WorldCom is currently experiencing an interruption of service in various hubs in the U.S. We are working to restore service as quickly as possible.
      Dialup: Normal
      Hub: Normal
      Outages: Normal

      One of the big problems here is that Woldcom still operates various units as separate entities, virtually no integration has been done to get UUnet working with MFS working with MCI. It's a lot of fun troubleshooting a circuit and having techs tell you "the problem is with MCI, I work for MFS." !!!!! They all work for Worldcom!

      Okay, rant mode off.
    • ... i try to abstain from being a smart-ass but outages are normal?

      Verity Slob, PR flack for Worldcom, confirmed that Worldcom customers are indeed offline. Asked why the company's website said ``Outages: Normal '', she replied: ``Well, outages are normal if you are a Worldcom sucker. Oh, did I say `sucker'? I meant victim! I mean, I really meant ...'' At this point, Ms. Slob was interrupted by several aides, who sedated and removed her, concluding the press confrence.

      Several Worldcom customers were able to confirm that Ms. Slob's statements had been quite accurate.

  • InternetTrafficReport (Score:5, Informative)

    by LogicX ( 8327 ) <slashdot@lo[ ]x.us ['gic' in gap]> on Thursday October 03, 2002 @02:25PM (#4382757) Homepage Journal
    a whole lot of red over at the InternetTrafficReport [internettr...report.com] any other good informative sites?
    • Most revealing is the 7-day [internettr...report.com] plot of network activity and response times. While there are normal variations thoughout the days, there's a definite spike there at the end.

  • I blame Robert Novak... (Score:4, Funny)

    by FyRE666 ( 263011 ) on Thursday October 03, 2002 @02:25PM (#4382758) Homepage
    I think his petswarehouse.com site's had so much traffic over the last couple of hours it's exploded and caused a huge chain reaction ;-)

  • Post article link (Score:5, Informative)

    by budalite ( 454527 ) on Thursday October 03, 2002 @02:25PM (#4382763)
    article on WorldCom Outage [washingtonpost.com]

  • In their lines? (Score:5, Funny)

    by sporty ( 27564 ) on Thursday October 03, 2002 @02:26PM (#4382768) Homepage
    "UUNET/WorldCom Backbone Diffiiculties" - Am I the only one who thought they were talking about the management and not the infrastructure?

    -s

  • Huh? (Score:5, Funny)

    by aikido_kit ( 546590 ) on Thursday October 03, 2002 @02:26PM (#4382772)
    Quote:Is anyone outside of the Southeastern U.S. experiencing the effects of this outage?

    Are you asking people who have no internet service to post a message? ;-)

  • It's not just Worldcom (Score:5, Interesting)

    by EvilBastard ( 77954 ) on Thursday October 03, 2002 @02:26PM (#4382775) Homepage
    Check the internet traffic report for North America [internettr...report.com]. Traffic's gone nuts, and routers are under load all over the place. It's coming back now, but about two hours ago the page was more orange then any other colour.

  • West coast screwed too (Score:3, Informative)

    by TCaM ( 308943 ) on Thursday October 03, 2002 @02:27PM (#4382777) Homepage
    I work at a small hosting company and our UUNet connectivity (Central California via Anaheim hub) has been screwed since around 6am pacific time. Up and down all morning with latency between 500 and 2000 ms when it is up. Yay worldcom.

  • Switzerland... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Some Guy ( 21271 ) on Thursday October 03, 2002 @02:27PM (#4382781)
    ...seems to be fine.

    Oh, come on. Laugh! You know you want to.
  • My home web server, through a UUnet SDSL connection, has about a third the usual traffic. Problems started about 5AM this morning, when the whole outside world would disappear for a couple minutes at a time. Peering connections with other big ISP's here in the DC area seem to have been up and down all day, and in all there's about a third the traffic I'd normally expect on a weekday.

    Here at work (not served directly by UUNet) service to various websites has been intermittently down for up to a few hours at a time.

  • Yahoo has more info too (Score:3, Informative)

    by GuNgA-DiN ( 17556 ) on Thursday October 03, 2002 @02:28PM (#4382785)
    Check it out here [yahoo.com]
  • Must be slowing down from trying to filter all
    that porn after being slapped by the Pennsylvania
    State Government :) JK
    WorldCom Forced To Block Questionable Sites [slashdot.org]
  • Im currently gathering quotes for a new leased line as part of a office move to new premises. Dont know how they got hold of our details, but i had a call from worldcom today about arranging a visit from a sales representative for a leased line quote. I wonder how they react when i ask them about this?

    I have had prior dealings with Uunet as one of our customers use them, and to be honest, their support is dire. One of their DNS servers was not refreshing its cache well at all, resulting in a client not being able to access our website at random periods. Wierd error, one minute he would get "proxy errors, no website at " where ip was a old ip we no longer used, and the next, he would get us fine.
    • They were cheaper than UUNET on a burstable T1, and I haven't had any issues today - related to UUNET. No that still sounds bad. They've been good, I don't see what the poster see's :)

      They've been rated #1 or #2 the past few years on Boardwatch (Savvis could own it for all I know), based on latency and ping time, IIRC.

      They do multiple peering, and supposedly are dynamic, so with UUNET down, supposedly they're rerouting my traffic across another provider to reach those spots..

      Of course, if a site is actually ON UUNET, there might no be any other way to get there.. get it? :P

  • AT&T Outage yesterday!? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by jwriney ( 16598 )
    Yesterday morning, I got to work. Net was down. Phones were down. I got a message from our network support. It said that AT&T service (our bandwidth and long distance provider) was down all over the east coast. It came back about an hour later.

    What the hell happened? Nothing on the news, nothing obvious on AT&T's site. You'd think that a hour long outage of an entire coast would at least hit the newswires.
  • My network failed over to my other provider. At about 11:30 EST the net started to act funkey. Since I have turned them off things are back to normal... The only thing worse then a failed T1 line, is a silently failed T1 line. What a pain.

  • rumour mill also on nanog (Score:3, Informative)

    by martin ( 1336 ) <maxsec@gm[ ].com ['ail' in gap]> on Thursday October 03, 2002 @02:31PM (#4382812) Journal

    http://www.merit.edu/mail.archives/nanog/msg0407 8. html

    nothing concrete and MIDS doesn't show anything on the weather reports (not that it means anything).

  • Problems in NYC, too (Score:2, Informative)

    by Mastedon ( 156598 )
    I am a WCom customer in NYC. We have a hub-and-spoke VPN from them, hub in NYC and spokes around the USA.

    We have had problems today around the country including NYC. Most of them seem to be resulting from routing issues across their backbone.
  • The internet hasn't been working for me all day.

  • Philadelphia (Score:2, Informative)

    by zhrike ( 448699 )
    Have had problems all day, though it seems to be clearing up now.

    Most of our issues have been problems resolving names, in fact hitting IP addresses has been possible throughout our problems.

    When I called this AM I heard the automated message and left it at that. After 1pm EST, I called again, and spoke with a technician who said "the problem has been escalated from what we originally thought...our gateway routers are going down, and even after we reboot them, they go back down..." Gateway routers will put a hurtin on one's infrastructure, eh?

  • Trouble at my ISP (Score:2, Informative)

    by Colonel Panic ( 15235 )
    This morning around 10:30AM I couldn't get anywhere on the web. When I logged in again later, this was part of the daily message from my ISP:

    "10/3 Issues with our backbone provider were impairing access outside the SpiritOne/Aracnet network from 10:20AM until 10:55AM this morning. The backbone connection is still down but at the moment all traffic has been diverted to our secondary backbone connection."
  • The problems with WorldCom's Internet backbone today explains why on a number of sites I visit frequently things are slowing down quite a bit. No wonder banner ads are not showing correctly.
  • Digex mnages hosting for a key service my employer provides, and they're in and out intermittently.

    Our VPN link keeps going up, down, down in one direction, around in circles, several times per minute.

    http://www.internettrafficreport.com [internettr...report.com] has some fun results for you, too.

  • Oh great... (Score:2, Funny)

    by splume ( 560873 )
    You've really done it this time /.

  • Trouble In TO (Score:3, Interesting)

    by PunchMonkey ( 261983 ) on Thursday October 03, 2002 @02:35PM (#4382850) Homepage
    We have a T1 Worldcom line here in Toronto, it's fine for the most part, but we have some servers hosted (?somewhere?) in the US with Level3, and we've had a horrible time connecting to them today. Through my home cable Internet connection, the connections to our servers are fine.
  • Right now in the southern portion of the United states they've been hit by a hurricaine.

    Might that be a reason for disruptions? Falling telephone poles, Floods of water, Winds taking Satellite dishes and well, Making satellites from them?

  • FP! (Score:2, Funny)

    by halftrack ( 454203 )
    First post! ... no wait.

  • Port 137 (Score:2, Interesting)

    by noewun ( 591275 )
    I have been seeing an enormous number of netbios (port 137) hits on my firewall over the last few days. I usually get a few here and there (in between ssh and ftp hits from Asia. . .) but it's been the majority of stuff over the past coupla days.

  • /. effect? (Score:3, Funny)

    by JeanBaptiste ( 537955 ) on Thursday October 03, 2002 @02:41PM (#4382898)
    So they are having routing problems and you put a link to their web page up. Nice of you.
  • You'd thiink someone would make the obviious post about the use of the letter ii in the subject. II mean, iif they ediited the storiies a liittle closer, the'd not miiss such obviious spelliing errors.
  • What I usually do as soon as I wake up in the morning is check the ip traffic on major US backbones such as exodus. you can find plenty of open route servers in this page www.traceroute.org. And I can say that the load was unusally high this morning(sh ip ?).
  • I've been lagging/not lagging off and on on IRC, about 83ms-100ms pings to google (slightly above normal), apparently there was a big outage or something because when I came back my BNC running on my router had disconnected. For a few minutes or so, I lagged horribly on IRC and AIM, and had no ping anywhere...

    --j

  • Fixed Now (Score:2, Funny)

    by jimmyCarter ( 56088 )
    My bad, I fixed the hardware problem. Everything should be working now. -- Al Gore
    • I figure GWB will blame Saddam Hussein when he can't get to his favorite [enron.com] web [bigoil.com] sites [iwishiwere...tortoo.com]. Then he can use it as proof they hate us and want to kill us all.

  • It was a national issue - and now it's up. (Score:5, Informative)

    by carlhirsch ( 87880 ) on Thursday October 03, 2002 @02:51PM (#4382986) Homepage
    There's been discussion of this on the NANOG [merit.edu] list, and my DS3 in Chicago was taken down hard by this. Physical layer okay, but traffic died once it was two or three hops into UUnet/Worldcom's core. First outage was from 2am to 8am, second outage from approx. 10:45am (CST) to 2pm. The master tickets for this outage are 651744 (DS1 and below) and 651751 (DS3, OC3 and above). I just got off the phone with Worldcom's NOC and the story I got is that all the border routers that took a dive are back up save a few that they're bringing back up here in Chicago. Worldcom has provided confirmation that the Reason For Outage was a wildly unsuccessful BGP config propagation.

  • restore a routing anomaly (Score:3, Funny)

    by frovingslosh ( 582462 ) on Thursday October 03, 2002 @02:51PM (#4382987)
    The problem is pretty clear - they are working to restore a routing anomaly rather than correcting the ones they still have. I would tell them that if they continue to restore anomalies things will only get wrose, but I can't get through to them.

  • "Diffiiculties"? (Score:5, Funny)

    by waldoj ( 8229 ) <waldo&jaquith,org> on Thursday October 03, 2002 @02:55PM (#4383020) Homepage Journal
    "Diffiiculties?"

    Oh, man, it's affecting data transmission quality now.

    -Waldo Jaquith
  • Anything routed to UUnet from Comcast (AT&T) has been picking up a 800ms lag. It has been doing this off and on for the past week or so.
  • Last night (circa 9PM MDT) I could only reach sites via Level3 or ATT (via L3), according to traceroute, for about an hour or so. Nothing else got anywhere at all, so it might have been local ISP problem.
  • For twenty minutes this morning my traffic to the east coast was being dropped at XL2.SEA.ALTER.NET
  • He is basically the go between for the Tech and customers...he says downtimes like this happen everyday, it's just an extremely bad day today. :-)

  • Favorite quote from the Post article (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anixamander ( 448308 ) on Thursday October 03, 2002 @03:08PM (#4383105) Journal
    The network outage was unrelated to WorldCom's bankruptcy, and the cause is unknown, Burns said.


    I have this image that in order to save money, the are routing all of the Southeast's traffic through and AOL dialup using Windows internet sharing.

  • I'm seeing this outage here... (Score:3, Funny)

    by MoneyJunk ( 56047 ) on Thursday October 03, 2002 @03:12PM (#4383116) Journal
    I can't even get to the Pets Warehouse [petswarehouse.com] site!
  • I will give you your so called "Internet" back as soon as you declare me King of the World! Pinky, gnaw on that wire some more.

    But Brain, it hurts my teef.

    Pinky! Destiny awaits us!

    Narf!

    Brain taps foot, frowns at Pinky standing alone covered in electrical char with a wire in his mouth.

  • Proof that WCOM was fiddling around this morning. (Score:5, Informative)

    by supabeast! ( 84658 ) on Thursday October 03, 2002 @03:15PM (#4383136)
    Following is WorldCom's maintenance announcement about today's work, which I recieved because WorldCom is my company's broadband ISP.

    During the Normal operations window on Oct 3, 2002
    WorldCom will be performing the following scheduled maintenance
    activities.

    This activity is scheduled to take place from 3:00 a.m. to 6:00 a.m.
    (local hub time) in the contiguous US and elsewhere from 3:00 a.m. to
    7:00 a.m. (local hub time) and may affect your connectivity. The
    following
    customer ID will be impacted: XXXXXXXXX.

    If you have any questions, please contact our local Customer Network
    Support Center. Please reference the internal ticket number 645346.

    Quality System Management-Global Maintenance Planning
    Worldcom (http://www.uu.net)
    1(800) 900-0241 / +1(703) 886-5440

    WorldCom United States 1-800-900-0241 (select the following options in
    order: 2, then 4, then 1)
    WorldCom Denmark (45) 80.30.50.50
    WorldCom Italy (39) 02.3600.1887
    WorldCom Sweden (46) 8.750.88.50
    WorldCom Switzerland (41) 1.580.86.11

  • bad? good? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by axxackall ( 579006 )
    Actually I like the fact of such interruptions - it may convience more and more managers, architects and developers to use asyncronous transactional messaging protocols (like JMS or SOAP or even SMTP if with confirmation) vs decent client server ones (CORBA, proprietary).
  • ..is it called bankruptcy?
  • for hours now here in SF. Thought it was just my employer but I feel better now.

  • Probably an IOS upgrade gone to hell... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Agent Green ( 231202 ) on Thursday October 03, 2002 @03:30PM (#4383262)
    Anyone who's done any kind of IOS upgrading on some of the upper-end Cisco routers and Juniper routers knows that the upgraded images aren't always the most stable items around.

    At one point, there was a severe outage at Genuity referred to as "Black Tuesday", when an IOS upgrade sunk a majority of the network and caused a ripple that made for a really shitty morning.

    That was a few years ago, though. I can't go into the specifics of the RFO...but the failure was a very visible issue which resulted in modifications to the testing and change management processes.

    Unfortunately, sometimes testing production software doesn't sufficiently break until actually put into production.

  • Possible causes (Score:3, Funny)

    by dgb2n ( 85206 ) <dgb2n&yahoo,com> on Thursday October 03, 2002 @03:46PM (#4383387)
    Significant increase in demand.

    Redhat 8.0 ISO's
    Mandrake 9.0 ISO's
    UT 2003

  • Its obvious (Score:3, Funny)

    by sheepab ( 461960 ) on Thursday October 03, 2002 @03:55PM (#4383457) Homepage
    Its obviously NOT a backbone problem....Redhat 8.0 just came out a few days ago...of coarse traffic is going to be nuts, and slower than hell, ITS 5 CD'S NOW!(including source, mind you)
  • The worst part of an outage like this is the users always blame you for any connectivity problems. "I can't get to the D&B website, when are you going to have it fixed?", you patiently explain the circuits to your provider are fine, your provider's circuts are fine, and the problem is either with D&B's network or their provider. "Yeah, whatever, when are you going to have it fixed?", lusers are utterly hopeless, unfortunately you have to at least humor them when they sign your paychecks.

  • Routing database deletions (Score:3, Interesting)

    by vanyel ( 28049 ) on Thursday October 03, 2002 @09:02PM (#4384817) Journal
    I run a small ISP in Portland, OR who's been down for two days because my network got deleted from the RADB from which the backbone ISP builds their routing tables. It's been working fine since I started using it almost a year ago, and magically stopped working the evening of Oct 1 (first of the month, in the evening when the backbone updates their tables), so I think a policy change topside is the "routing anomaly" that has barfed up everything. At least I'm supposed to be back online later this evening...

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