Steve Bellovin writes:

What is going on here? I've seen similar delays -- i.e., over 4 seconds -- for several days now, though only during the day. It's also not just the routers being slow about pings; round-trip to the destination (www.law.cornell.edu, in this case) is over 5 seconds:

I managed to delete the traceroute from my note. From other replies, it seems to affect folks who are going through UUnet to Sprint: traceroute to www.law.cornell.edu (128.253.22.200) from sigaba.research.att.com (135.207.23.169), 40 hops max, 40 byte packets 1 oden.research.att.com (135.207.31.1) 0.511 ms 0.545 ms 0.507 ms 2 opsec.research.att.com (135.207.1.2) 1.321 ms 1.178 ms 1.316 ms 3 192.20.225.225 (192.20.225.225) 3.429 ms 2.472 ms 3.297 ms 4 Serial1-1-1.GW1.EWR1.ALTER.NET (157.130.0.177) 9.495 ms 7.279 ms 29.985 ms 5 113.ATM2-0.XR1.EWR1.ALTER.NET (146.188.176.34) 10.142 ms 5.166 ms 3.784 ms 6 193.ATM7-0.XR1.NYC4.ALTER.NET (146.188.178.53) 5.283 ms 6.269 ms 4.283 ms 7 189.ATM11-0-0.BR1.NYC4.ALTER.NET (146.188.177.189) 71.224 ms 10.384 ms 200.119 ms 8 137.39.23.146 (137.39.23.146) 10.799 ms 5.844 ms 5.543 ms 9 sl-bb10-nyc-2-3-155M.sprintlink.net (144.232.8.221) 6.910 ms 6.153 ms 7.388 ms 10 sl-bb22-rly-13-0.sprintlink.net (144.232.9.226) 853.712 ms 861.250 ms 888.238 ms 11 sl-gw9-rly-9-0.sprintlink.net (144.232.7.254) 4891.870 ms 4958.808 ms * --Steve Bellovin