According to the folk who answered over there, they are saying that 'Worldcom is done, and it should be resolved within an hour.' Also, it only appears that thier primary DNS is down, but secondary is OK: traceroute to 205.215.6.2 (205.215.6.2), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets . . 7 h1.peer1.wdc1.genuity.net (207.240.1.246) 20.514 ms 27.583 ms 27.301 ms 8 mae-east.netrail.net (192.41.177.228) 46.077 ms 40.92 ms 40.871 ms 9 gf010.rt1.DCA.netrail.net (205.215.4.1) 39.081 ms 63.107 ms 66.406 ms 10 ginger.netrail.net (205.215.6.2) 38.71 ms 33.085 ms 26.207 ms

...

The Atlanta NAP (www.atlanta-nap.net run by Nathan Stratton) is down, probably for good. We're a customer (luckily a multihomed one!), and the word is WORLDCOM pulled all their circuits due to debts. So all the netrail.net mailing lists and stuff will be down too.

You know, although I do feel bad for Netrail and its customers, I did read this with a keen appreciation for the irony, given Mr Stratton's public comments about how badly BBN's power system was misdesigned for allowing them to take multi-hour outages, particularly in light of the fact that the outage in question was beyond BBN's immediate ability to fix, and not BBN's fault.

It didn't have the personal tastiness of Mr Bass's unfortunate encounter with bad weather a year or so ago, but frankly, I can't help but engage in schadenfreude anyway.

I also wonder how the millions of GRFs and the billions of other high-tech expensive pieces of equipment in Netrail's large network Mr Stratton often commented upon are coping right now.

One final extract, from <Pine.BSF.3.95q.970716143738.3017A-100000@netrail.net> posted to NANOG during the recent backhoe season: "Ya, we are going to kill worldcom for this [outage caused by a fibre-cut]". No tickee, no complainee?

The moral of this story: bad things happen to everyone. But when it happens to braggarts who seem to specialize in doing things better than people who are trying their best, it's terribly, terribly cool. --:)

--- "Don't go with a spineless ISP; we have more backbone." Alex Rubenstein -- alex@nac.net -- KC2BUO -- www.nac.net net @ccess corporation, 201-983-0725 -- 201-983-0725