North American Network Operators Group

Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical

uunet europe outage

  • From: JP Donnio
  • Date: Thu May 11 17:29:49 2000

Hi,

Although this is not a new problem (it started on 27 april), I wanted to let
you know there are recurring transatlantic problems for UUnet networks in
France, Uk, The Netherlands and Belgium (ASes 702, 3259, 1890, 2822, 1849).
Symptom is that periodically transatlantic IP connectivity stops for periods
between a few minutes to a few dozen minutes but BGP sessions are not
interrupted. From UUnet France we have measured 13 outages of over 4 minutes
since 1st May for a total of 168 minutes, including 6 outages today!

More than just the problems that such connectivity failures cause, the fact
that UUnet BGP sessions continue to announce unreachable networks prefixes
during outages prevent all multihomed networks to efficiently handle those
problems.

As you might guess, UUnet has been providing no explanation at all except 1
fax sent to all its customers. The national NOCs seem totally unaware and
unable to cope as the problem is transatlantic and handled in the US. There
is no equivalent of www.noc.uu.net for european networks... What you should
also know is that European UUnet networks are peering with very few networks
other than their transit customers and that they rely on AS701. When
transatlantic connectivity fails like this, most of the internet becomes
unreachable.

This message is not sent here in order to make UUnet react; we have already
put the necessary pressure locally including public statements with no
reaction at all. This is just to inform the community how european UUnet
customers are treated. It is significant of the general low level of
communication that European ISPs have with their customers, at least
compared to the US.

JP Donnio
network consultant

Attachment: smime.p7s
Description: application/pkcs7-signature