Global outage takes down sites and services across the internet

Router problem blamed...

A global internet outage took down sites and services across the web on Monday.

The internet outage affected sites and services worldwide, including Time Warner Cable in the US and numerous ISPs in the UKPhoto: Shutterstock

The outage began shortly after 14:00 GMT, and affected telco Time Warner Cable in the US and numerous ISPs in the UK, including Eclipse Internet and Easynet.

Several of the affected companies blamed the downtime on a problem with the firmware in Juniper Network routers.

"This outage has affected other networks running Juniper routers with the majority of them seeing their devices core dump and reload," affected ISP Phyber Communications said.

The problems at several of the ISPs appear to stem from the Juniper routers being reset at tier one network provider Level 3, which routes internet traffic between the US, the UK and the rest of the world.

"Shortly after 9am ET today, Level 3's network experienced several outages across North America and Europe relating to some of the routers on our network," Level 3 said.

"Our technicians worked quickly to bring systems back online. At this time, all connection issues have been resolved, and we are working hard with our equipment vendors to determine the exact cause of the outage and ensure all systems are stable."

Juniper Networks had not responded to a request for a comment at the time of publication.

As a consequence of the network outages across the globe, a number of websites and online services suffered disruption, including link-shortening service bit.ly; CBS Interactive, publisher of silicon.com; and RIM's BlackBerry service.

According to RIM, some customers "may have experienced delays with their ISP" but "RIM's BlackBerry Infrastructure was not impacted".

Most of the affected sites and services appeared to be back online shortly after 16:00 GMT.