Only-slightly-relevant but fun fact: back around the late ‘90s the UK’s university network JANET lost its Internet connection to the US through a combination of

Only-slightly-relevant but fun fact: back around the late ‘90s the UK’s university network JANET lost its Internet connection to the US through a combination of a cable outage and some bad preexisting dealmaking and BGP config. In the end of course it got fixed and JANET got firmly reorganized, but for several days or weeks you really could reach most or all European servers from UK universities but not US (North American?) ones. My details are fuzzy because it’s not easy to find any information about the episode anymore, but it really did happen...