Study Shows Blackout's Effects on Individual Routers

Slashdot alerted me to an online report on the effects of the northeast blackout on individual routers. Renesys monitored BGP announcements and watched routers drop out of the tables, as shown in their graph below. From the report:


"The majority of the power failures began at about 16:10 EDT. Immediately thereafter, the number of routes in global routing tables dropped rapidly, falling by nearly 1000 within five minutes. This likely corresponded to the loss of reachability of networks which did not have alternative backup power sources. Table size then continued to drop, though at a slightly more gradual pace. We suspect that losses during this time correspond to networks with limited backup power which were able to stay online temporarily until those power supplies were exhausted. By 19:00 EDT, routing table sizes had reached their low point, a full 2500 networks fewer than the current baseline size."

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