Level 3 Outage Affects Internet, Cause Unknown (February 24, 2004)
Between 1:45 p.m. and 3:30 p.m. Pacific Standard Time, many popular Web sites were either slower than usual to load or more likely not to load at all, according to Internet performance measurement company Keynote Systems. On a typical day, Web sites take less than 3 seconds to respond and can be loaded successfully at least 85 percent of the time.
Level 3 Communications Inc, a major internet backbone provider, suffered a significant outage of parts of its network yesterday, which left many internet users without a connection, and which also slowed down the internet overall.
A spokesperson for the company said in a brief statement: "We are investigating the cause of the problem, which has been fully resolved." He would not comment further, not even to explain the extent or nature of the problem.
A spokesperson for Keynote Systems Inc, which tracks the performance of web site performance, said Level 3 had told it a hardware problem was to blame, but rumors were flying last night about a distributed denial of service attack.
Keynote said average response times from the top 40 business web sites it tracks was down to four seconds between 1.45pm and 3.30pm US Pacific Time, from an usual average of below three seconds. Availability dropped to below 85%.
The problems on Level 3 were most prominent at its facilities in San Diego and London, Keynote said. The company measured response times over eight seconds and availability below 60% at Level 3 facilities during the outage.
Level 3 says it serves 92 markets in the US and Europe, and has an 18,900 miles of network in the US, another 3,600 miles in Europe.
The company provides wholesale bandwidth, modem banks, and infrastructure services to a number of major US ISPs, including EarthLink and Covad Communications, both of which were hit by yesterday's outage.
EarthLink's support web site said at 6.50pm US Eastern Time: "Currently Level 3 is experiencing major problems on their network. This is causing us to see packet loss and latency across the board nationwide."
Unsubstantiated reports on DSLReports.com yesterday claimed that Level 3 had started blocking ICMP (internet control message protocol) packets during the outage, which could be suggestive of DDoS countermeasures.
It was further suggested that the incident may be connected to an ongoing packet war between groups of malicious hackers. However, any attack against a provider of Level 3's scale would have had to have been huge indeed, making the DDoS scenario seem unlikely.
http://www.cbronline.com/currentnews/d315bf335bbc533c80256e4400386088 "However, any attack against a provider of Level 3's scale would have had to have been huge indeed, making the DDoS scenario seem unlikely. " Unlikely, but possible.
Hmmm...some Freepers on this thread commented they were having difficulties with Google searches yesterday...wonder if its related to this?