http://www.wcco.com:80/news/stories/news-20000201-042256.html

Internet Outage Strikes Rural Minnesota

Problem Was Not Related To Phone Outages

MINNEAPOLIS, Updated 12:17 a.m. CST February 1, 2000 -- Computer hardware problems led to slow or difficult Internet access Monday for thousands of customers in rural Minnesota.

Kathryn Lovik, a spokeswoman for Plymouth-based Onvoy, said the company had a problem with some hardware in a router through which Internet traffic flows.

The problem did not affect the Twin Cities area.

The problem was not related to phone outages in the Twin Cities area Monday morning. Equipment failure in a U S West office led to disrupted phone service between 11 a.m. and 12:30 p.m.

U S West was unable to complete some long-distance and local calls, but 911 service was not affected.

-- Homer Beanfang (Bats@inbellfry.com), February 01, 2000

Answers

I recently (within 2 weeks) had some trouble with my internet service in the Hartford, CT area. Username and password were not being validated and the call was terminated. This happened for a couple of days in a row, and I thought at the time that it was just a traffic problem. When I called their tech support folks, I was told that customers from the entire region served by this provider (Java Net) were calling in with the same problem. I asked the tech support person if she thought the problem was with any Cisco routers that they have deployed. I then mentioned that I had recently read a report from Cisco listing a good many of their products as having known bugs in them. I then asked if she thought that any of the problems they were experiencing were Y2K related. Dead silence. After about 10 seconds, she said that they aren't supposed to say... and said no more. Hmmmmmm.

Jimmy

-- Jimmy Splinters (inthe@dark.com), February 01, 2000.

Insight is our provider and they had an outage Saturday for the entire southeast. They finally came back up but we have had interrmittent(sp) service since then.

-- Johnny (jljtm@bellsouth.net), February 01, 2000.