http://cbs.marketwatch.com/archive/19990806/news/current/wcom.htx?source=blq/yhoo&dist=yhoo It would seem that WCOM has indeed been communicating with the public, as early as 13:33 EST, August 6th. This is my concern with the recent trend in using NANOG as a pulpit for bringing focus to certain network problems. The information displayed here is not always accurate, and often subjective. I do not mean to suggest that Sean is, only that it does happen, and the list goes for a while with no correction. Usually I'd argue that any information is better than no information, but when the quality is of suspect value, I'm not sure the viewpoint stands. I'd recommend that an alternate forum be used for outage notification, like Stan Barber's outage-discuss list. -alan Thus spake Sean Donelan (SEAN@SDG.DRA.COM) on or about Mon, Aug 09, 1999 at 01:12:47AM -0500:
SEAN@dra.COM (Sean Donelan) writes:
I'm trying to post no more than once in 12 hours.
Its been another twelve hours.
Although I don't like all the red on our network map, it is showing how resiliant IP protocols are. My core network uses several different facility providers and technologies, and for those customers who have more than one connection: IP works. How else could I send this e-mail? However, for customers with only one connection, they don't really care how many other connections are working. They only care about their one connection.
MCI/Worldcom claims 75% up their frame-relay network is 'up.' This is down from their previous claim on Friday that 90% of the frame-relay network was 'up.' We still see a number of PVCs throughout the US and Canada either completely down, or dropping so many frames as to be unusable. I received similar reports from other MCI/Worldcom frame-relay users throughout the US and even as far away as Germany.
To try to figure out what is going on MCI/Worldcom imposed a 'quiet time' on their network, telling their engineers to stop touching things. This helped somewhat. Portions of the network stabilized on its own, but there is still massive congestion. The quiet time is over. Now MCI/Worldcom is trying to reduce the congestion by disconnecting parts of the frame-relay network.
Remember this is Sunday, normally a low-traffic day. Monday is underway in Europe, and will be hitting the East Coast of the USA soon. Traffic levels are going to increase on the network, assuming any traffic can get through at all.
MCI/Worldcom's web site continues its long silence about this outage. I've got to hand it to MCI/Worldcom; its engineers may have trouble keeping a frame-relay network going, but its PR department has done a great job keeping a lid on the story. Even MCI/Worldcom customers can't find out what is happening. -- Sean Donelan, Data Research Associates, Inc, St. Louis, MO Affiliation given for identification not representation