Internet Outage Sweeps U.S.
An Internet outage swept through the United States after Hurricane Ike caused millions of dollars of damage in the Gulf Coast and beyond according to a firm that tracks connectivity.
Renesys Corp. says Internet connections in Texas, Ohio and Pennsylvania were the hardest hit.
However, the storm also caused outages in Arkansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Kentucky, Illinois and Indiana. Surrounding states had scattered outages as well.
It was the largest area to lose Internet connection since the Northeast blackout of 2003, said data engineer Martin Brown at Renesys, based out of Manchester, N.H.
The Northeast blackout took out 2,500 networks
The company doesn’t track Internet connectivity by the number users. Instead it looks at "autonomous networks," which roughly equates to the "neighborhoods" of the global network.
Each represents a university or a small Internet service provider, or part of a larger carrier’s network.
Ike had taken out more than 400 such networks for at least an hour each during the peak Monday.
Renesys said some of the outages persisted Wednesday, with Time Warner Cable Inc. (TWC)’s network in Ohio and NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston being affected.
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