There is apparently a serious problem with the web currently, centred on the outing of a very large parcel of bandwith in California - but every part of the www is suffering outages. Whether this has anything to do with the fires, I don't know.
This is part of a fairly long and detailed explanation from one of the webmasters on another list I belong to which has worldwide membership:
<<
When something happens to the net, the protocols compensate. They
route traffic around the damage, but re-routing loads circuits in
areas that were not damaged themselves, so it slows them in turn.
Usually not in a noticeable way, but they do slow slightly. If a lot
of re-routing is going on, those alternate paths will slow very
noticeably.
Another illusion is that the internet is spread evenly around the
world. It is not. All of these people and computers talking "to each
other" are really talking through a chain of intermediaries and that
requires a spaghetti bowl of connections. A few really big pasta bowls
service almost every connection from minute to minute. One is Western
Europe and the other is the United States. Actually, on a map, the
United States really is three big bowls of bandwidth pasta: the
midwest and the two coasts. When someone in Argentina sends a note to
someone in South Africa, it should not have to go through any of those
regions, but in practice it often will to bypass problems with a more
direct route. The United States has most of the bandwidth in the
entire globe and we are only slightly behind in density in Western
Europe. Everywhere else has hot spots that glow on a map of internet
connections, especially Malaysia, but our two regions shine like suns.
Right now, the internet has suffered significant damage. We can't be
sure how much because the people we might ask are busy fixing things.
California is one of the richest sources of bandwidth on the planet
and several of the major bandwidth suppliers saw their infrastructure
go up in flames last week. Apparently only the southern half of the
state was affected, but even that is like saying "we only lost
Scotland". A big chunk of the internet is in southern California. Both
in terms of communication bandwidth and users, whose traffic is now
being routed elsewhere to get around their local damage. Sometimes
just to get from one side of the state to another a packet must go
thousands of miles.......
>> END
Compared to another forum I frequent, I can't think they've ever had any downtime now in over 2 years. This one must have been down at least 12 times in the same period, Jamie will probably have a clue as he uses the same host. If one host can keep up a seemingly unblemished record, then that sets a benchmark. As a stroppy consumer who is fond of voting with his feet (usually with some diatribe to boot) that's what I'd demand from someone whom I was paying for a service. Mind you there might be a lot of aggro to go with changing that I'm unaware of. I haven't left Talk Talk yet for that reason, but they're pretty well down my list next time I need an ISP.
