Massive Fiber Cut Pauses East-West Traffic

At least four Internet service providers are experiencing severe traffic backlogs because of a massive fiber-optic cable cut that put out four OC-192 lines connecting data networks on the East and West Coasts.

Industry sources told Inter@ctive Week that the cut was accidentally made by an unidentified gas company in Ohio around 12:30 EST today.

The news is sending shockwaves through the networking community, with many carrier operators struggling to understand why, all of a sudden, their traffic is routed through London and Denmark. At least four Internet service providers are being affected by the outage. Various online sources have named AboveNet; GTE Internetworking; and MFS Communications, a WorldCom subsidiary, as ISPs hit the worst.

"Let me tell you, it really hurts right now," said Dave Rand, AboveNet's chief technology officer. "We were given a 1 hour estimate for this problem to be corrected."

GTE Internetworking's public relations department had heard of an outage in Pennsylvania earlier today, but had no comment on the Ohio development. MCI WorldCom public relations didn't have an immediate answer to the query.