Fergie's Tech Blog

Internet Access Dispute Cut Off Some Businesses

Arshad Mohammed writes in The Washington Post:

Last week, the computers in Barbara F. Buckley's office in the District suddenly went blind to parts of the Internet.

A colleague at the Precursor Group, which analyzes the telecommunications industry for institutional investors, couldn't get online to send out the firm's research. Another couldn't download statistics from a government Web site.

"This is a disaster," Buckley, a Precursor vice president, recalled thinking. "A research firm is really only supposed to do two things and that is create the research and sell it, and we can't do either."

After a day of troubleshooting, Buckley finally found the "culprit." It was a dispute between Cogent Communications Group Inc. and Level 3 Communications Inc., two of the companies that move Internet traffic around the world seamlessly but, in this case, cut off many of their clients from parts of the Web.

posted by Fergie @ 10/14/2005 05:34:00 AM