Level3 worldwide emergency upgrade?

Wed Feb 6 13:10:15 UTC 2013

On Wed, Feb 06, 2013 at 07:57:06AM -0500, Alex Rubenstein scribbled:
# The question should be more along the lines of, "why aren't you multihomed in a way that would make a 30 minute outage (which is inevitable) irrelevant to you?

The fun part of this emergency maintenance in the northeast USA was that even
folks who are multihomed felt it: Level3 managed to do this in a way that
kept BGP sessions up but killed the ability to actually pass traffic.  I'm not
sure what they did that caused this, or whether anyone but northeast folks
were affected by it, but it sure was neat to be effectively blackholed in and
out of one of your provided circuits for a while.

Also, in the northeast, they managed to make it quite a bit more than a 30min
outage for many people; they even slid hours outside of their advertised
emergency window.

I do applaud them for what I can only assume was a *massive* undertaking:
emergency upgrading that many routers in such a short period of time.

-- Jonathan Towne