Tuesday, 20 May 2014 06:26

Bad Routing Slows Down US to EU Traffic

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Yesterday a planned update managed to take down part of the transatlantic cabling that connects the US to EU. Although there are no really firm details we do know that for a couple of hours services were disrupted for European Internet users. Multiple companies responded to the disruption with information pages. Swedish Telecom Telias confirmed the shortly after the complaints began hitting sites like Twitter and Facebook.

Originally the cable was thought you be cut, but this turned out to be an inaccurate statement when Telias posted their Twitter update stating they had an update gone bad. The more likely cause of the traffic was bad routing which can either send traffic the wrong way or have your data packets simply disappear into nothing.
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The issue affect the UK, France, Germany, Italy and more. At one point during the issue CloudFlare reported that their traffic was being rerouted through Asia to get to the US. This re-routing caused connectivity issues for many of their clients. The impact was not as large as it could have been thanks to the fact that many companies use multiple carriers to ensure that no single line outage takes them down.

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Read 2227 times Last modified on Tuesday, 20 May 2014 06:29

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