On a quiet weekend it may have been a bit too quiet for some users in the Northeast US.  One reader, we shall call him ‘Joe’ for anonymity purposes, pointed out that there may have been some serious outages of some sort in the Philadelphia area, particularly related to one particular carrier.  I am currently asking all readers from the region to submit their input to our Contact page if they have anything to contribute.  Right now I am deliberately withholding all the information that ‘Joe’ submitted to see if we get more collaborating evidence.  Please, if you are in the Northeast US, and noticed any Internet difficulties over the last 24 hours, write in, let us know, and we’ll put everything together to try to find out what’s going on.

Thanx much,

Tony Carothers

Handler du’jour

/=== UPDATE #1 ===/

We have received a lot of input, for which we are grateful.  Right now we do not have anything more definitive other than one particular carrier and DNS issues.  We will keep you posted as things develop.

/=== UPDATE #2 ===/

Thank you to all who have written in, the input has been fantastic.  While it seems to be common knowledge that a problem exists with the Internet in the NE, we here at ISC are always trying to look a little further, dig a little deeper to see exactly what is going on rather than just seeing that there is a problem and rehashing it.  One of the reasons I did not mention the name of a provider in my initial post is I wanted feedback from users who had experienced first-hand the difficulties or outages that were occurring.  Here are two stories that deal directly with the issue at hand.

http://www.lancastertrash.com/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=40

http://www.merit.edu/mail.archives/nanog/msg07194.html

Once again, thank you to all who have contributed to the cause today, I greatly appreciate it.