I have been sitting here in Hawaii all day trying to reach various podcast sites on the Internet and they keep timing out. This is on both Road Runner Broadband and Earthlink dial up. All dayI have been getting e-mail from listeners of our podcast that cannot download the show. When I reach the folks at Libsyn they tell me they are up but a Tier 1 traffic provider has cut peering access to Cogent, i’m on the level 3 side my podcast files are on the Cogent side.
Well isn’t that a bunch of crap. It appears that Level3.net cut the access to a large portion of the Internet, and now companies all across the nation are going into emergency mode trying to route around this Level 3 debacle. But the issue is bigger. I live in Hawaii and a great majority of traffic going to the mainland is on Level 3 infrastructure. This is causing Hawaii to be cut off to large portions of the Internet . My packets for a great number of sites I visit go three hops and die at some Level3 switch.
This is Internet Terrorism in my opinion, being perpetrated by a company that is rumored to be pissed of that Cogent is selling bandwidth much cheaper than Level3 can. I am sure within a couple of days with thousands of routing tables being updated that things will be back to normal but it explains why sites on the east coast are largely unreachable. [Slashdot]