Monday morning, millions of people were forced to go offline as a software glitch in the “Border Gateway Protocol” crashed data networks around the world.
Early Monday, a set of updates triggered a software glitch in the routers of Juniper Networks. When these routers crashed, key Internet pathways shut down with them.
As a result, some of the largest Internet providers in the United States suffered short, yet massive blackouts. Time Warner Cable, the third most popular Internet provider in the country, lost service from most of its customer base, ranging from the southeast to the Midwest.
“My house, which uses Time Warner, lost Internet usage for almost all morning. Fortunately, I was on campus, so I didn’t experience any blackouts. Thank you Comcast,” said junior Government and Politics major Freddie Wolf.
In addition to internet outages, for many students BlackBerry was knocked offline for almost one hour. BlackBerry officials quickly blamed the problem on “global Internet issue.” For BlackBerry users, however, already annoyed from a three-day outage in October, this was the final straw.
“It’s ridiculous that this has happened so many times this month. I don’t care if this isn’t entirely their fault; the fact is that BlackBerry has lost its Internet connection twice now, once for almost three days, while other smart phones haven’t. They need to change something,” said junior engineering major Jeremy Finifter.
Even those without Time Warner Cable or a BlackBerry felt the effects of the outage. Bit.ly, used by Twitter to link web sources to tweets, was another victim. All of its links were temporarily rendered unusable, meaning readers could not connect to the stories.
“I know it seems trivial, but I use Twitter for news in the morning, and it was annoying to not be able to follow the links,” said senior Government and Politics major Matt White.
Most websites and servers returned to normal by late morning, so students late to wake were hardly aware of the situation. Some that were awake in the morning, however, were forced to go about their early morning routine without the benefit of using the Internet.