The Blackout of 2003

Early reports suggest that the Internet and phone systems performed well during the Blackout of 2003, with reports of one possible carrier hotel outage and a small decrease in the number of hosts on the 'Net.

Some providers at Toronto's primary carrier hotel at 151 Front Street apparently experienced air conditioning problems from Thursday night into Friday morning, according to reports from the North American Network Operators Group (NANOG) mailing list. It was not immediately clear whether the issues were localized or building-wide or related to a generator failure, but some providers in the building were offline. NANOG posts said the building's AC was on the mend as of about 5 am Friday. Some problems may be lingering. As of 10 am Eastern Time Friday, I wasn't able to reach the Toronto Internet Exchange via the Web.

Network operators reported that BGP routing tables showed a drop of between 2,600 and 3,510 prefixes, a drop of between 1 and 2 percent from optimum traffic levels.

Major news coverage of telecom and Internet infrastructure was largely upbeat. A PC World story noted that Internet was largely untouched by the power outages. The only problems were with certain news Web sites that were slowed by high volumes of traffic, according to Keynote Systems, whose Internet Health Report showed business as usual on the major backbones.

Volume was also the largest problem for phone companies in the Northeast. While most systems were working, the outages sparked call volume from those coping with the power outage, especially on cell phones. There's additional coverage of the blackout's impact on telecom in the Washington Post and New York Times.

A small number of companies activated their disaster recovery plans, according to Sungard, but most did so primarily to gain access to the powered office space at Sungard facilities.