ISPs Back After Network Outages

Reports this morning indicate a software upgrade gone awry is responsible for a widespread network outage at Level 3 early this morning.

Verio reportedly experienced network issues during the same timeframe.

Level 3’s problems began in the early hours Friday morning.

According to a source at Level 3, the company was performing a maintenance update at 1:45 a.m. EST when an unexpected routing instability developed, affecting the network in North America and in Europe.

Members of the North American Network Operators Group (NANOG) discussion group said people in the United Kingdom, Ireland and Italy were also experiencing outages.

Mark Marchand, a Verizon spokesman, said Verizon was made aware of the outages and that the problems were resolved by 5 a.m. EST with little, if any, impact to its network during the outage.

During an outage at one network, telecommunications providers will routinely re-route their traffic to avoid unhealthy networks.

The Internet Health Report, a real-time network performance matrix of the top U.S. carriers hosted by Keynote Systems , shows no problems from either Level 3 or Verio at the moment.

A report of the past 24 hours, however, shows widespread serious latency issues throughout the networks.