What? Where?
On Sunday December 29th, Level3 Communications, one of the largest IP transit networks in North America and Europe, suffered an outage affecting sites such as ESPN, Amazon, and CNN. Noticeable missing from Level3? Any official acknowledgment or discussion of the incident; and an outage that disrupts ESPN on a Sunday will definitely be noticed.
When one of the largest internet backbones shows trouble, there are two ways to handle the situation (after fixing the issue of course). The first would be what we here call the “Duck and Cover” method (sometimes referred to as the Vinnie Barbarino approach). In this method, the company either makes no mention of the incident or does a classic Vinnie impersonation… such as:
Concerned User: I think there’s an outage.
Level3: What? Where?
Concerned User: I think there’s a problem with the network.
Level3: I’m So Confused.
(mugs to the camera and audience goes crazy)
