On Thu, 05 April 2001, "Richard A. Steenbergen" wrote:

4 T1's were down in Denver? Stop the world, I want off. :P

You missed the bigger story about the AOL Instant Messanger outtage for a large portion of the day (which I heard lots about from all my AIM loving friends). Doubtless many thousands of network engineers were cut off from their vital lines of communication.

I don't use AIM, no one I know uses AIM. Other than spending 15 minutes removing it from my PC after I install Netscape, AIM has little effect on my life. I went to the AOL IM web site http://www.aol.com/aim/ and AOL has no mention of any outages on its web page. Perhaps someone from AOL would like to explain why IM keeps failing? On the other hand, I was trying to check reservations on a European airline for a trip, and Galileo being out of commission did affect my life a bit. It was nice that Galileo's spokesperson explained what was happening, so I didn't assume that the crappy service I experienced wasn't typical of Galileo, but was due to a network outage. As I mentioned before, the interesting thing about outages isn't if you are up or down. But if you are down while your competitors are up.