Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2000 11:05:38 -0500 (EST) From: BCPL.NET SysAdmin To: BCPL.NET News Subject: BCPL.NET NEWS: Unscheduled Outages ----------------------------------- UNSCHEDULED OUTAGES MONDAY MARCH 27 ----------------------------------- BACKHOE RUNS AMOK, TAKES DOWN PART OF THE INTERNET! Okay, maybe it wasn't really that dramatic, but yesterday (Monday, March 27) was definitely not a good day for Web browsing. A major fiber optic telecommunications cable in the Philadelphia area was cut through by construction equipment, making some parts of the Internet backbone unreachable. The Help Desk was inundated with calls from customers complaining that access to many Web sites was sporadic or even impossible. Repairs were completed by about 6:00 PM, but the after effects continued well into the evening. Everything seems back to normal this morning. A totally unrelated outage occurred at about 2:15 PM when one of the three T1 lines that connect BCPL.NET to UUNET (our upstream provider) went down. The problem was found and repaired by Bell Atlantic at about 6:00 PM, luckily before the evening rush. During the down time the remaining two T1 lines provided ample bandwidth for the pre-rush load. If the line had remained down later into the evening, you might have experienced slow access to all remote sites, compounding the "death by backhoe" situation described above. Luckily that didn't happen. BCPL.NET INTERNET SERVICES CONTACTS: ----------------------------------- Administration & Policy: ispadmin@bcpl.net 410-887-6180 Sales, Renewals, Account Status: accounts@bcpl.net 410-887-4172 Technical Support (Help Desk): help@bcpl.net 410-887-3297 Usenet News Newsgroup Requests news-admin@bcpl.net 410-887-6180 E-Mail & Newsgroup Abuse Reports: abuse@bcpl.net 410-887-6180 FAX: 410-887-2091 Help Pages: http://www.bcpl.net/help.html (or enter "help" at the UNIX shell prompt) System News Archives: http://www.bcpl.net/sysnews.html (or enter "sysnews" at the UNIX shell prompt)