Hurricane Ike caused large Internet outage

by Michael Smith

Hurricane Ike caused damage that goes into the billions of US Dollars. While the huge catastrophe that was expected did not occur more than twenty people lost their lives. Aside from the environmental damage and that to the countryside the storm also caused considerable damage to the country's infrastructure.

According to estimates of insurance experts the costs resulting from the damage cause by hurricane Ike will run to about US$18 billion and not the smallest part of this sum comes from the damage cause to the infrastructure of the US. The hurricane cause the biggest Internet outage from more than five years.

Responsible for the outages in the Internet connection were mostly the power outages caused by the storm damaging power lines. States that bore the brunt of those damages are Pennsylvania, Ohio and Texas. The company Renesys has made it its task to monitor the Internet connections in the United States and has provided the relevant dates from its observations. The talk if of an Internet outage the size of which has not been seen since at least 2003.

At the time of the height of the outages more than 400 IP nets were without a working connection and amongst the affected companies were amongst other Time Warner Cable Inc. in Ohio, who supply private users with Internet and Cable connections. Also affected was the Johnson Space Center (NASA) in Houston.

The extent of this was quite obvious from the contacts that I personally have in the USA that we unable to access the Net and who have had problems for weeks after; some still have problems. The truth is that still at the end of September 2008 some who I know have only intermittent connection to the Internet as a result of the damage caused by that hurricane.

© M Smith (Veshengro), September 2008
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