On 16 Feb 2021, at 2:37 PM, John Kristoff <
jtk@dataplane.org> wrote:
Friends,
I'd like to start a thread about the most famous and widespread Internet
operational issues, outages or implementation incompatibilities you
have seen.
Which examples would make up your top three?
John -
I have no idea what outages were most memorable for others, but the Stanford transfer switch explosion in October 1996 resulted in a much of the Internet in the Bay Area simply not being reachable for several days.
At the time there were three main power grids feeding Stanford – two from PG&E and one from Stanford’s own CoGen plant – and somehow a rat crawling into one of the two 12KVA transfer switches resulted in an the switch disppearing in an epic explosion that even took out a portion of the exterior wall of the building.
The ensuing restoration involved lots of industry folks, GE power-on-wheel generating stations, anaconda-sized power cables, and all in all was quite the adventure.
FYI,
/John