Level 3 Restores Major Weekend Internet Outage

By Daniel Santa Cruz

Level 3 Communications has fixed an Internet-service outage that left users from parts of New York City to Philadelphia with either slow service or no service for almost 24 hours on Saturday. An equipment breakdown at a network hub in the Big Apple gets the blame.

The outage started when a high-traffic fiber-optic switch failed. A spokesperson for Level 3 told The Wall Street Journal on Sunday that technicians worked quickly to fix it.

Some connections were more affected than others. Cablevision said it was able to restore its Optimum service by rerouting traffic about an hour after the Level 3 outage hit.

Level 3 carries Internet traffic for many big companies and ISPs. The company was able to secure a huge win over the summer when it replaced AT&T as the primary service provider for Starbucks’ 7,000-plus U.S. locations.

It wasn’t immediately clear why traffic from cable subscribers in the New York-New Jersey area wasn’t rerouted more quickly. Customers familiar with the repair work told the Journal that some more heavily trafficked sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, were unavailable for several hours while other subscribers were able to access other sites without problems.