back to article Network problems? It's not just you. Level3 outages reported in the US

Network carrier Level3 says a severed cable is to blame for an outage that hit portions of the US Friday morning. The company said that a cable in the Dallas, TX region has been severed and is leading to service disruptions for traffic running through the hub. Level3 had the following statement to pass along to El Reg on the …

  1. chivo243 Silver badge

    coincidence

    Here in The Netherlands, there was a sizable outage. Knock on seems to affect our IPTV, but not internet ;-}

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Texas? What "Texas"?

    We'd love to deny that Texas is even part of the United States but then the media keeps reminding us of that nightmare. Not having Texas on the internet has just raised the average I.Q. of the entire world.

    Is there a way to anonymously thank the cable workers for this one?

    >;-)

    1. WolfFan Silver badge

      Re: Texas? What "Texas"?

      Is that nice? After all, Texas was good enough to take in Ted (the Canadian Cuban) Cruz and firewall him away from the rest of the world. It'd be better if they could find a way to send him back to Calgary, but we can't have everything.

      Texas is also responsible for other political hilarity, not least that gentleman who proves that George W. may have been the stupid Bush brother but he was the smart Texas governor. Actually, there are two of 'em who are demonstrably even more dense than George, one who was running for Prez until recently (even his not-quite-room temperature, in Celsius, IQ managed to work out just how bad the odds are of his winning) and the guy who's still governor and who appears to be convinced that the Evil Commie Muslim Kenyan is going to use the US Army to stage a coup against the democratically elected (but most definitely not Democrat) white Christian Aryan gun-owners of the Great State of Texas. (You think I'm making this up? Read on: http://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2015/05/02/403865824/texas-governor-deploys-state-guard-to-stave-off-obama-takeover) Personally, I'd just love to see the Texas National Guard try to hold off the US Army. Why, it might well be that George was the smartest politician in Texas...

      Without Texas the rest of the US, indeed the rest of the world, would be sorely lacking in high-quality entertainment.

      1. Alistair
        Windows

        Re: Texas? What "Texas"?

        Sorry, as a diehard Canuck, you can keep *BOTH* Ted Cruz and Justin Beiber. Thanks

        1. DGM in Calgary

          Re: Texas? What "Texas"?

          @Alistair: As both a Canuck and a Calgarian, I absolutely 100% agree with you !!

          I suspect downvotes are from people who'd rather we'd kept Cruz and Bieber in Canada.

          1. Alistair
            Windows

            Re: Texas? What "Texas"?

            I didn't realize Stephen@notabalancedbudget.ca was a a commentard. Apparently he has two accounts.

  3. jonnycando
    Thumb Up

    Re Texas....

    All you have to do now is cede Austin to California!

  4. John Stoffel

    The fibre's natural enemy...

    ... is the backhoe. It's only going to worse and individual fibres and bundles get more and more capacity per-fibre. It may not even help you to run the down seperate fibres if they're in the same bundle.

    I remember once when we were having the roads resurfaced at the college where I worked at the time. One of those big road grinders managed to find and grab a 300 pair telephone bundle, which at the time was also the network link to the other side of Campus. There was a steam tunnel between buildings, so instead of running the bundle under it, they had run it over the tunnel, where it was only 4" down from the TOP of the road. Oops...

    Some poor guy had to spend hours and hours splicing in a new cable.

  5. Snipp

    Balls

    This fuckup seriously affected my work day. Remote users were bitching in my ear on a Friday. And our Cisco phones went down too.

    1. A Non e-mouse Silver badge

      Re: Balls

      And our Cisco phones went down too.

      And you didn't have SRST? Or were your phones going down just a coincidence?

  6. Mpeler
    Big Brother

    All Your Fiber Are Belong To Us

    Just a couple of *cough* fresh splices, nothing to see here, please move on...

  7. a_yank_lurker

    OOPS

    I wonder if these idiots ever considered the possibility of a natural gas line or buried electricity. This happens all to often and I sometimes wonder if anyone bothers to map the lines or even read the map.

    1. Montreal Sean

      Re: OOPS

      Speaking of gas lines...

      Pretty much every time any sewer system repairs are done in my neighborhood, the city manages to break a natural gas line.

      They hit the one that feeds several neighbouring blocks, and the flames were a good twenty feet high until the gas company arrived to shut the line.

      No injuries or explosions yet.

    2. Sgt_Oddball

      Re: OOPS

      I seem to recall that's a very common problem in pretty much every city, and that there was research being done at Leeds university with regards to developing ways of mapping out this stuff easier.

    3. xybyrgy

      Re: OOPS

      In US: 1-800-MISS-DIG. They will come out and put little flags along every single buried utility in existence.

      1. cd

        Re: OOPS

        Yes, but often the flags can be wrong. One dig in a southwestern city was outside the lines and hit the power main they were trying to avoid dead-on, marked 20' away. Depends on the skill of various people, and corps keep doing everything they can to get rid of anyone who makes a living, replacing them with Slavery 2.0 tards.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: OOPS

          Slavery 2.0? More like Serfdom 2.0 with a side dish of debt peonage at the level of nation-state level. Cyprus and Greece are only the Proof-of-Concept testdrives.

    4. Terry Barnes

      Re: OOPS

      There's a reason that utilities are buried with telecoms at the top, water next, then the dangerous stuff.

  8. Tom 7

    Its about time someone came up with routing protocol

    that was tolerant of a nuclear attack. Perhaps we can get DARPA to look into this.

    1. Terry Barnes

      Re: Its about time someone came up with routing protocol

      As far as I can tell, the Internet continued to function, so it appears that the protocol is working.

      Individual node resilience is a commercial decision - what does it cost you to stay up versus what would it cost you to be down?

      1. Tom 7

        Re: Its about time someone came up with routing protocol

        There was a lot of outage. Thats dropping not re-routing.

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