All North American Data Center Worlds Network Technical Difficulties (Oct. 26)

[LillithCale]

I don't see how a faulty fiber/equipment in Houston would affect people all over the country. Certainly makes bad infrastructure look worse if that is the case lol.

Please see this explaination here:

This isn't a perfect explanation, but it should give you some idea of who and what Level 3 are.

Level 3 is one of a very few Internet 'Backbone' companies that provide the major data transmission services that are the foundation of the Internet as it stands now. These kinds of company have fiber optic networks for moving huge quantities of Internet traffic around the globe very efficiently. ISPs - Internet Service Providers - interconnect with companies like Level 3 to ensure that their customer's traffic is efficiently routed across the internet to the desired destination. Very large ISPs like AT&T, ComCast, Charter/Time Warner and others maintain their own backbones that cover part of the service, but they interface with companies like Level 3 to connect their backbone to the rest of the world. These agreements are called peering agreements because both parties agree to operate as peers, and allow traffic from their backbone to run across their peer's backbone infrastructure.

So, if you think of all the customer network links as twigs on branches. The branches are the ISPs, and the large branches and trunk of the tree are the network backbone providers like Level 3. Since more than one branch is affected by this problem, the problem is not specific ISP branches of the tree, the problem is in the trunk of the tree.