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

[Kosmos992k]

Perhaps, but you also seem content with forcing an unrelated company into fixing a problem caused by others... Guess we'll have to agree to disagree (and I'm home now and my ISP doesn't use L3 so I can/have logged in and I want to go and play rather than keep trying to explain things on these forums!)

Fine, go play, but don't try to tell those who are affected that they should change ISP, since at last count the ISPs involved include AT&T, Comcast, Cox Communications, Charter and Time Warner (add RCN to that list). It's very nice that YOU can play, lots of others can't.

Changing ISPs isn't an option. Calling your ISP is perfectly fine, making them understand the issue is not. I know it's not because I have contacted my ISPs, I have been through this before as well, and it was no different then. Quite how you think a relatively small number of users of a relatively small online game are going to force their SPs to do something is beyond me, it's a David and Goliath situation, although in this case David is about 3cm tall, and Goliath is looking down on the top floors of skyscrapers.

Most definitely a routing/service outage, and cut or failing fiber at a focal point can be really nasty with all the added technical complications you get at this order of magnitude (and with so many people supposedly being affected downstream).
I'm rather surprised that they didn't immediately escalate this, though - I work in IT as a profession, and my hometown houses one of the main regional/national network hubs for the Italian territory. Even here, the emergence of such a single point of failure would have raised quite a few eyebrows...

I completely agree. It's surprising that such a vital link has a single point of failure. These networks are typically designed to remove single points of failure. But even with a single point of failure, I can't understand why they haven't re-routed across partner networks while they fix their stuff.