[Ramius]

The Internet isn’t that old. Some of the first generation equipment is still online. Not much, but some. The usage volume growth exponentially exceeded anyone’s predictions when they were building out the backbone. It’s a miracle there haven’t been -more- massive outages in the last decade.

[Paladin2]

What about the “route around” design of the pipes of the ‘net?

[wastoute]

I admit I am not an IT guy but I thought the whole point of the Internet was that is a NET. It was in invented to keep disruptions from preventing launch orders from being transmitted. I don’t recall ever hearing about an Internet outage in the past.

[The Duke]

Of course the Internet was designed to inherently re-route traffic. Nobody ever seems to mention that anymore.

[no-s]

It’s a miracle there haven’t been -more- massive outages in the last decade. I work for an e-commerce retailer and we monitor real-time stats on peering traffic (we use the data as a paranoia check on some other monitoring, helps to handle those "the site is slow" questions).

At any given moment there's always something down, some backbone provider is not passing traffic from another or with reduced reliability. In the last year, I've noticed the outages have increased 2x-3x and and also the time-to-repair has gone up.

We kid each other about it but in the back of my mind I'm wondering if there isn't some nasty trend about to surface this fall/winter.