Looks like issues at Verizon... maybe the transition to Frontier (which is supposed to close April 1st) isn't going well...
Edit: Looks like Miami is a focal point, too, and Florida is, of course, one of the regions being acquired by Frontier in just a few days...
Edit 2: Random aside, headline is rather editorialized. These outages aren't "across the internet". They appear to affect a single operator in a couple of major regions.
Just called a friend in Baghdad over Skype about an hour ago and I can confirm that there are massive outages of the Internet there too.
We had to call each other like 10 times for a 15 minutes call.
It was very tedious!
Does packet loss actually translate to unreachable hosts, or does me mean there is just going to be a slowdown due to having to send lost packets again?
Both. It slows down traffic because packets have to be resent, and because of TCP (which assumes that if packets are lost, the connection must be congested, and therefore data should be sent slower).
If enough packets are resent the connection may not complete or it may timeout (if a packet needs to be resent multiple times, for ex).
I'm the founder of NuevoCloud, and this is one of the problems we are working on. Basically, we can route connections around congestion. So for example, if your website is in dallas and the visitor is in germany, but the normal route has an issue.. then we might reroute it germany > virginia > dallas until the issue is resolved. So your website still stays up.
23 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 63.7 ms ] threadEdit: Looks like Miami is a focal point, too, and Florida is, of course, one of the regions being acquired by Frontier in just a few days...
Edit 2: Random aside, headline is rather editorialized. These outages aren't "across the internet". They appear to affect a single operator in a couple of major regions.
http://internethealthreport.com/Main.aspx?Metric=PL
... fallen to 12.5% now
Cogent <> Level 3 is the only problem link left with 13.33% packet loss
For more reliable and accurate information, the outages list is probably what you want to refer to.
If enough packets are resent the connection may not complete or it may timeout (if a packet needs to be resent multiple times, for ex).
I'm the founder of NuevoCloud, and this is one of the problems we are working on. Basically, we can route connections around congestion. So for example, if your website is in dallas and the visitor is in germany, but the normal route has an issue.. then we might reroute it germany > virginia > dallas until the issue is resolved. So your website still stays up.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_the_United_States#...
2. http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users/