Network Blackout
An anonymous reader writes "Renesys put together a special report on the effects of the recent blackout on routing and network reachability on the Internet. It includes a cool animation of networks dropping off the internet (presumably as a result of the power outage). It is interesting to see how localized some of the outage was--networks in New York state right up to the Vermont border go dark while everything on the other side of the border is quiet. New York City obviously gets clobbered."
Don't these backbone routers have backup? I was in an ISP server house in the UK which had a full backup system. In the case of a power failure, it had a UPS that kicked in for 10 seconds while the generator was booting up, which then provided power for the infrastructure of the building. I would find it hard to believe that in the USA they don't have similar systems?