MAE West Down a Second Time By Randy Barrett Power failed at the Metropolitan Access Exchange West on the morning of July 16, the second time an outage has crippled the major peering point in less than a week. At 8:17am PST, a 100-amp breaker failed and cut power to the number one giga switch at the MFS/WorldCom portion of MAE West. WorldCom Inc. (www.wcom.com) officials said electricity was restored by 9:06am. During the outage, all Internet service providers peering with MFS at the site experienced difficulties handing off data packets, said WorldCom spokesperson Linda Laughlin. "The providers on the MFS side were killed," said Rob Bowman, director of engineering for Exodus Communications Inc. (www.exodus.net). On July 11 a similar outage occurred after a construction crew at the site accidentally shorted out power. That caused a major slow down in Internet traffic on the west coast, particularly for small providers who were not ‘multi-homed"—or using two backbone providers. MAE West is run cooperatively by NASA Ames Research Center and MFS Communications Co. Network operators reported the NASA side of MAE West was not affected by the power failure. Laughlin said WorldCom was flying several power engineers to the site to evaluate the electrical situation. Senior Writer Inter@ctive Week http://www.intweek.com A Ziff-Davis publication Voice: 703-938-2087 Fax: 2088