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Tier One ISPs Dying
xbmodder writes "Two tier one ISPs are down today. At about 23:30PST both Verio and Level 3 starting having problems with routes. According to Level 3 this is a software upgrade gone awry. Is this the end for Level 3?" Many, many reports about this are coming in, and if you're wondering why the stories were rather sparse overnight, it's because it's difficult to post them without internet access. Hope everyone else is back online too.
Tier 1 are the huge ISPs, which peer with eachother (and don't pay eachother transit fees) and sell transit services to smaller ISPs (which do pay fees to send traffic through the Tier 1 ISPs). So yeah, bandwidth wholesalers is pretty accurate. See this wikipedia article.
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While this only lasted a few hours, it still caused a mess across the North American Internet during those hours. The point is a small amount of big networks are responsible for over 90% of the traffic on the Internet. If alter.net went down it would be total chaos. If just one of the major peering points went down, sure the traffic would be rerouted, but overloading the other points at such high latency that it would be almost unusuable. You better hope no one destroys MAE-EAST or we'll have a live example of what ife without the Internet is like.
The reason that Level 3 isn't happy with the peering arrangement currently is that it's not even remotely even. Level 3 sends almost nothing over Cogent's network and Cogent sends over a vast majority of their traffic through Level 3. A peering agreement is based on the premise that the companies will be sending almost equal amounts of traffic through each network. Level 3 has been analyzing that for a time now but the last straw was when Cogent had a sales blitz targeting Level 3 customers saying that they would dramatically drop their prices to almost nothing to get them to switch away from Level 3. They are now also using the downtime that was experienced due to the peering problem in their advantage even though Cogent is in the wrong. Cogent knew about the depeering and did nothing to resolve it.