Internet Outage Halts Service to Various Businesses
A business telecommunications company experienced an outage in the United States on Thursday that interrupted Internet service to many corporations across the country.
Herndon, Va.-based XO Communications confirmed to TechNewsDaily that its system has been experiencing issues that have affected Internet access to areas ranging from New York and Tennessee to Colorado and Utah.
The problem involved one of XO’s carrier customers that came onto their network and made more routing announcements than usual.
"We accepted the number and consequently ended up announcing more routes to other service providers where we all interconnect. However, the configuration didn’t allow that,” said Randolph Nicklas, chief technology officer of XO Communications. “As a result, we were temporarily disconnected from connectivity .”
The company did not say how many of its 90,000 business clients were affected by the outage.
“We don’t know if it was human error or if it was a hardware issue. However, there is no indication at this point that it was a problem with the hardware,” he said.
Nicklas said the company is doing everything it can to discover the root cause of the problem.
"In hindsight, we should have discussed with other Internet service providers how to increase the maximum routing number ahead of time," Nicklas said. "We are working to make sure this type of error doesn’t happen again."
