OUTAGE: MCI Worldcom nationwide ATM network

Thu Feb 4 01:03:10 UTC 1999

The source of the report was MCI Worldcom customer service.

Due to the number of mergers, it is sometimes hard to keep who has what
where straight.  Even the employees of the companies involved have trouble.
As an outsider, I have no hope of getting everything correct.  But here
goes.

As I understand this, the ATM problem is affecting Worldcom's original
ATM backbone, which uses Stratacom ATM switches.  Perhaps the reason
why worldcom CSC said they were escalating the matter with Cisco is
Stratacom is now owned by Cisco.  MCI Worldcom CSC only told us the
vendor involved was Cisco, not anything about specific equipment models
affected.

I believe the other ATM networks owned by MCI Worldcom, such as MCI and
UUNET are still seperate and aren't directly impacted.  I don't know where
MFS's network was rolled into.

To fix the problem, MCI Worldcom customer service reports they will have
to reload all the Worldcom ATM switches this evening between Midnight and
2:00am.

>This is interesting.  I don't recall their "entire" ATM network being Cisco .. 
>or much of it at all for that matter.  What was the source of this report?
>
>
>> MCI Worldcom had a circuit outage in Indianapolis at about 11:30 CST 
>> 3-Feb-1999.  Since then the MCI Worldcom ATM network has been FUBARed.
>> MCI Worldcom believes the problem is in some Cisco equipment, and
>> cisco has issued a patch.  MCI Worldcom will be reloading their entire
>> nationwide ATM network between midnight and 2:00am hoping to fix the
>> problem.
>> 
>> I don't know if MCI Worldcom has filed a FCC outage report like AT&T
>> did when their frame-relay network had problem.
-- 
 Sean Donelan, Data Research Associates, Inc, St. Louis, MO
   Affiliation given for identification not representation