CNN has been reporting on the MCI fiber cut in Manhattan. Since various other carriers lease each other's facilities, it has also been affecting worldcom, uunet and others. Sprint and AT&T claim they haven't been affected. The last report I got around 6pm, MCI hadn't located the actual fiber cut or cause; only the general vicinity. I have not found an official statement on this outage on the MCI web site. I had posted the following a couple of weeks ago to the outage-discuss@academ.com mailing list, but other network operators may be interested in methods for keeping their customers informed about operational issues (besides relying on CNN). ==================================================================== I'm off charging at windmills again. I've written up a protocol so network providers can inform their users (and maybe other providers) about significant network events in a distributed, robust manner. If you recognize parts of this, I have stolen the best ideas from half-a-dozen other protocols, News, NTP, SDR, and even OSPF and RIP. Since communication satellites, pagers, SS7 networks, SONET rings and so forth have been known to fail from time to time, simply relying on any single method for notifying users about problems isn't sufficient. The net has suffered from the 'flash-crowd' effect when everyone tries to check centralized information sources such as web servers. I have attempted to address some of the issues in other notification methods. Namely I've tried to give provider control and authentication of messages, as well as giving enough information so end-users to filter messages of interest to them. I've tried to assume if someone can abuse the system, they will; so things are a bit paranoid. Stale messages remain a problem of any notification system, so I tried to give providers an explicit mechanism to cancel messages within their own network. I would appreciate any interested persons looking over my current attempt at writing a draft at http://dranet.dra.com/nerf.html. I have also set up a mailing list nerf-l@listserv.dra.com (subscribe by sending a message to listserv@listserv.dra.com) for interested people. -- Sean Donelan, Data Research Associates, Inc, St. Louis, MO Affiliation given for identification not representation