As far as I'm aware the problem wasn't just limited to the UK but to the whole of Europe. One of our transit connection to the US using this Fiber, was disrupted. Following message we received from our transit provider:
We are currently experiencing a catastrophic failure on the fiber ring that is affectively isolating Europe. We are researching the possibility of alternative connectivity, and will update you as we get more information.
One more problem which was caused by this link outage is that our dns-servers (and those of multiple providers) where hit with a lot of dns lookups for lockdown.zonelabs.com (seems zonelabs firewall, queries that name). As the dns-server for that zone wasn't reachable anymore (no more traffic to the abovenet network in the US) the dns-servers had to do a query for each new lookup which caused a huge load. And effectively killing the customer dns servers, impacting traffic even more.
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As far as I'm aware the problem wasn't just limited to the UK but to the whole of Europe. One of our transit connection to the US using this Fiber, was disrupted. Following message we received from our transit provider:
We are currently experiencing a catastrophic failure on the fiber ring that is
affectively isolating Europe. We are researching the possibility of
alternative connectivity, and will update you as we get more information.
One more problem which was caused by this link outage is that our dns-servers (and those of multiple providers) where hit with a lot of dns lookups for lockdown.zonelabs.com (seems zonelabs firewall, queries that name). As the dns-server for that zone wasn't reachable anymore (no more traffic to the abovenet network in the US) the dns-servers had to do a query for each new lookup which caused a huge load. And effectively killing the customer dns servers, impacting traffic even more.