WorldCom outage ripples across Net

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WorldCom outage ripples across Net By John Borland Staff Writer, CNET News.com July 13, 2000, 12:30 p.m. PT One of the few points that connect the Internet's hundreds of networks was crippled for much of this week, forcing massive amounts of Internet traffic to shy away from the WorldCom-owned facility.

The problems slowed data transfers across the Net for a few days, network engineers said. But the outage highlights growing concerns about Net bottlenecks, which are pushing network companies toward new, expensive connections to keep their quality standards high.

"This was a particularly bad set of timing and circumstances," said Deepak Jain, director of strategic operations at AiNet, a Washington, D.C.-based network service provider.

The problem also comes at an awkward time for WorldCom, which is undergoing tight federal scrutiny of its control over the Internet data backbone market and suffered a crippling outage of key data services late last year. Federal regulators last month nixed the company's planned merger with Sprint, in large part because of concerns that the two companies would control too much of this backbone network. The merger was formally called off today.

WorldCom was able to fix the problem early this morning, bringing the network back to normal capacity.

http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1004-200-2253847.html?tag=st.ne.1004.ttext.ni

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), July 13, 2000


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