North American Network Operators Group
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Re: Carrier reliability and diversity

  • From: David Charlap
  • Date: Fri Apr 06 12:06:57 2001 
John Starta wrote:
> 
> The service interruption was apparently a result of a major regional
> power failure in Northern Virginia. I'm curious whether it was AOL or
> their providers who suffered from the power failure. I would expect
> AOL would have back-up power.
> 
> http://www.techtv.com/news/internet/story/0,24195,3320700,00.html

Something's fishy about this.

I'm in Northern Virginia (Vienna), not 15 miles from AOL's facilities
(in Reston and Dulles).  I experienced no power outage that day.  So if
there was a failure, it was certainly not "major regional".

During the outage, the AIM client would successfully connect, but would
abort with a database error trying to validate passwords.  Sounds more
like a servier failure to me.  (Although to be fair, my first test was
less than 30 minutes before the service came back, so I may have been
seeing their reboot sequence.)

-- David