ISP router changes cited in Internet slowdown

Computerworld - An eight-hour slowdown in worldwide Internet traffic early yesterday morning was caused by network delays at backbone Internet service providers Level 3 Communications Inc. and Verio Inc., according to an Internet traffic monitoring firm.
Keynote Systems Inc. said late yesterday in a note that users trying to access many top Web sites experienced "significant delays" as the normal near-100% site availability dipped to 93%.
Level 3's outage was caused by a configuration change to some of its edge routers in Chicago, which caused code to be corrupted elsewhere, said a source at the company. The change caused Level 3's network to go down between 2 a.m. and 6 a.m. EST.
This is the second network outage or delay related to Broomfield, Colo.-based Level 3 this month. On Oct. 6, Level 3 cut off its peering relationship with Cogent Communications Inc., another large provider of Internet backbone bandwidth, over a financial dispute (see "ISP spat blacks out Net connections"). That dispute was temporarily resolved and the peering connection was later re-established.
A spokesman for Verio denied that the service provider had suffered any outage.
"The interruption displayed on the Keynote site was not due to a Verio outage," he said in an e-mail statement. "This [apparent outage] was due, no doubt, to a connectivity issue with Keynote's probe. "

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