1. Internet Outage Trends Sean Donelan Equinix Inc NANOG 21 Atlanta, Georgia

2. What are the questions?  Was there any difference between Internet disruptions in 1999 and after Y2K?  Is the trend changing?  What really causes problems on the Internet?  What are fiber carriers and excavators doing to defend against the backhoe threat?

3. Methodology  Reviewed multiple sources –NANOG archives –Newspaper archives –Web searches –Personal archives  Identified unique outages (dedup multiple reports about the same event)  Did not identify root cause or carrier at fault  “Significant” – I know it when I see it

4. Year to Year comparison

5. Sample Events  Sep 17 1999 – Rochelle Park CO flooded  Sep 30 1999 – backhoe cuts gas line and fiber shared by multiple providers in Ohio  Nov 23 1999 – DCS failure, power outages, multiple fiber cuts on east and west coasts  May 22 2000 – Corrupt AS path crashes routers  Sep 8 2000 – Alternate fiber cut while primary circuit off-line for S.F. Bay Bridge repairs

6. Summary  119 significant disruptions in 1999  93 significant disruptions in 2000  Compared to FCC Telco reporting –170 outages reported for 7/1/98-6/30/99 –172 outages reported for 7/1/99-6/30/00  A dip during January and February 2000 compared to 1999

7. What are Diggers doing?  Database of excavators who routinely fail to notify One-Call centers  Free cellular call #DIG  Dig Safely and Common Ground Alliance  Improved ticket parsing and dispatching  New locating technology

8. DrillCheck  Courtesy: AT&T

9. Dig Safely

10. Internet Statistics?  Internet reliability publicly measured by end- to-end connections  Effects of congestion are included in Internet measurements (busy signals)  Some backbones report 100% availability  End-to-end reachability exceeds 97%  60% of Internet problems are repaired in less than 30 minutes

11. What causes problems?  Analysis of Internet “outages” –Maintenance (16.2%) –Loss of power (16%) –Fiber cuts (15.3%) –Hardware failure (9%) –Routing error (6.1%) –Congestion (4.6%) –Malicious attack (1.5%) –Software bug (1.3%) Courtesy: Internet Performance Measurement and Analysis Project University of Michigan

12. Original Concept  Paul Baran; On Distributed Communications: 1. Introduction to Distributed Communications Network (1964)On Distributed Communications: 1. Introduction to Distributed Communications Network

13. Questions? Sean Donelan Sdonelan@equinix.com Equinix Inc