On Sat, 23 June 2001, "Vivien M." wrote:

...

According to Exodus' trouble ticket it is a BGP instability between several locations in their network and with BGP customers.

Hmmmmm... You somehow found a way to get this information without agreeing to the NDA? Impressive. (For the people around here who aren't Exodus customers: subscribing to their network engineering/outage list theoretically implies agreeing to an NDA, which is presumably why no one here mentioned this)

I'm not subscribed to Exodus's network engineering mailing list, nor have I agreed to a NDA with Exodus about their outage information. Trying to apply an NDA to outage information has always struck me as a bit stupid. After all, NDA or not, people know you had an outage, what they don't know is your explanation why it happened. As we've seen, when there is a lack of good information, people will make up stories to fit. AT&T, with over 100 years experience of handling outages, seems to have thought out their policy better than some of the newer communication companies. AT&T doesn't go out of its way to advertise problems, but as far as I can tell, AT&T doesn't try to prevent its customers from telling other people about their experience with AT&T, good or bad. Think of it like a movie studio who only lets movie critics who agree to write good things about their movie see the movie. Whether this is "the" problem affecting Slashdot, a contributing factor, or unrelated, I do not know. Verizon also had DACS problems in Boston affecting circuits in the area. I believe Slashdot is located in the Boston area. And, of course, Slashdot has problems on a regular basis even when the network is working.