ISP router changes cited in Internet slowdown

24.10.2005
Von Eric Lai

An eight-hour slowdown in worldwide Internet traffic early Sunday 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 Sunday in a note that users trying to access many top Web sites experienced "significant delays" as the normal near-100 percent site availability dipped to 93 percent.

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. 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.