Of course, outside the US the internet *is* melting, from the inefficiency of
our protocols. Heck, until last month's inauguration of LinX (London Internet
Exchange), internal UK traffic was being routed to MAE East...
Rohit
NYT Report:
America Online Suffers One of Worst Outages in Cyberspace History
Six million America Online users were left off-line Wednesday when the
system went down, cutting them off from e-mail, chat rooms and the
World Wide Web. The system went down at 4 a.m. EDT during a scheduled
maintenance update, routine work that is generally done at that hour
to inconvenience the fewest possible members. It was still down 10
hours later, making it one of the worst outages in on-line history in
terms of length and number of people affected, The Associated Press
said.
"What happened was when we were doing the installation, we had a
technical problem. As a result, that technical problem has caused a
delay in having the system available to our members," spokeswoman Pam
McGraw said from AOL's Chantilly, Va., offices.
When users of the country's largest commercial on-line service tried
to log in, they were greeted by a message saying "Good-bye from
America Online. The system is temporarily unavailable. Please try
again in 1 hour and 30 minutes. Thank you for calling." AOL Chairman
Steve Case said every possible resource was applied to restore the
service. "We regret any inconvenience this may have caused our
customers. We will work to ensure that the problem does not recur," he
said. Previously, a software glitch brought down America Online's
e-mail system for an hour on June 19, but McGraw said that was a
different problem from the one Wednesday.