Net Sees Earthquake Damage, Routes Around It

davidwr writes "Japanese internet outages mostly healed themselves within hours. While some cables remain out, most computers that lost connectivity have it again. From James Cowie's blog: 'The engineers who built Japan's Internet created a dense web of domestic and international connectivity that is among the richest and most diverse on earth, as befits a critical gateway for global connectivity in and out of East Asia. At this point, it looks like their work may have allowed the Internet to do what it does best: route around catastrophic damage and keep the packets flowing, despite terrible chaos and uncertainty.' Let's hear it for redundancy and good planning." Reader Spy Handler points out another article about how redundancy and good planning are preventing disaster at Japan's troubled nuclear reactors, despite media-fueled speculation and panic to the contrary.

Comments

Re:anthropomorphizing

[mcavic]

The internet doesn't 'see' anything

Routers do. They can see a loss of connectivity and alter their routes accordingly.

why do we need to attribute it to anything beyond simple 'redundancy and good planning'?

A redundant route doesn't do any good without the intelligence (either human or machine) to determine which routes are up and send traffic through them only.