Re: Carrier reliability and diversity

[Sean Donelan <sean () donelan com>]

On Thu, 05 April 2001, "Richard A. Steenbergen" wrote:
> 4 T1's were down in Denver? Stop the world, I want off. :P
>
> You missed the bigger story about the AOL Instant Messanger outtage for a
> large portion of the day (which I heard lots about from all my AIM loving
> friends). Doubtless many thousands of network engineers were cut off from
> their vital lines of communication.

I don't use AIM, no one I know uses AIM.  Other than spending 15 minutes
removing it from my PC after I install Netscape, AIM has little effect
on my life.

I went to the AOL IM web site http://www.aol.com/aim/ and AOL has no
mention of any outages on its web page.  Perhaps someone from AOL
would like to explain why IM keeps failing?


On the other hand, I was trying to check reservations on a European airline
for a trip, and Galileo being out of commission did affect my life a bit.
It was nice that Galileo's spokesperson explained what was happening, so
I didn't assume that the crappy service I experienced wasn't typical of
Galileo, but was due to a network outage.

As I mentioned before, the interesting thing about outages isn't if you
are up or down.  But if you are down while your competitors are up.