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Interesting read. I'm reminded of when my internet literally came to a hault after 9/11. I was just a kid back then, but I'd be curious if anyone knows why. My

by kodah 4y ago

Interesting read. I'm reminded of when my internet literally came to a hault after 9/11. I was just a kid back then, but I'd be curious if anyone knows why. My hypothesis has always been that the internet, up to that moment in time, was a thing people logged into when it was convenient. Some people had DSL but it was still mostly dial up. However, that day everyone wanted to know what was going on.

teraflop 4y ago
I don't know of any evidence that the Internet as a whole suffered outages due to 9/11, but I can certainly believe that individual web sites and/or ISPs would have struggled. Maybe your ISP didn't have a fast enough backbone connection to support all of its customers, or maybe one of its internal routers became overloaded. Or maybe it literally didn't have enough phone lines to support all of the customers simultaneously dialing in.
- kodah 4y ago
  That's fair. I think we had what became Comcast at the time. I believe it was called @Home.
- thaw13579 4y ago
  I recall phone lines being overloaded shortly after, so that’s one bottleneck For dial-in.
AdamJacobMuller 4y ago
Every news website had major outages that day, I don't know details but I wouldn't be surprised if they were dealing with 100x or 1000x their normal traffic and they existed in a world before you could just push the scale up button on your AWS/GCP panel. It's also very likely that your ISP had backhaul issues, and myraid other issues existed related to capacity.
giantrobot 4y ago
For local connections I think you're spot on. A lot of ISPs had massively over provisioned backhaul. With a larger than average number of users connected simultaneously and heavily using their connections there was not enough backhaul to handle the load. This could be even more pronounced on cable since a single segment could have hundreds of subscribers sharing that segment's bandwidth.
hnlmorg 4y ago
I worked for a hosting company back then (quite a major name in the U.K.) and we didnt have any outages. So I suspect the other guesses are right wrt jammed phones lines, specific local ISP backhauls, and news sites being overloaded.

by kodah 4y ago

teraflop 4y ago

I don't know of any evidence that the Internet as a whole suffered outages due to 9/11, but I can certainly believe that individual web sites and/or ISPs would have struggled. Maybe your ISP didn't have a fast enough backbone connection to support all of its customers, or maybe one of its internal routers became overloaded. Or maybe it literally didn't have enough phone lines to support all of the customers simultaneously dialing in.

kodah 4y ago
That's fair. I think we had what became Comcast at the time. I believe it was called @Home.
thaw13579 4y ago
I recall phone lines being overloaded shortly after, so that’s one bottleneck For dial-in.

AdamJacobMuller 4y ago

Every news website had major outages that day, I don't know details but I wouldn't be surprised if they were dealing with 100x or 1000x their normal traffic and they existed in a world before you could just push the scale up button on your AWS/GCP panel. It's also very likely that your ISP had backhaul issues, and myraid other issues existed related to capacity.

giantrobot 4y ago

For local connections I think you're spot on. A lot of ISPs had massively over provisioned backhaul. With a larger than average number of users connected simultaneously and heavily using their connections there was not enough backhaul to handle the load. This could be even more pronounced on cable since a single segment could have hundreds of subscribers sharing that segment's bandwidth.

hnlmorg 4y ago

I worked for a hosting company back then (quite a major name in the U.K.) and we didnt have any outages. So I suspect the other guesses are right wrt jammed phones lines, specific local ISP backhauls, and news sites being overloaded.