Cogent network seized by fiber cuts

ISP Cogent Thursday had two fiber cuts in its network from construction mishaps, disrupting service in the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic regions of the country.

According to status reports on the Cogent Web site, a fiber between Houston and Tampa, Fla., was cut Thursday morning around 9:35 a.m. EST. A splicing crew is onsite repairing the fiber break, and repair is expected at 6 p.m. EST, according to the Cogent report.

The second fiber break, which apparently occurred at 10:10 a.m. EST, happened between Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. That fiber was spliced and routing was restored at 3:45 p.m. EST Thursday, according to the Cogent report.

According to Cogent, the cuts occurred in Washington and New Orleans.

"D.C.'s repaired, and it looks like about an hour for New Orleans," Cogent spokesman Jeff Henriksen said. "Just totally coincidental fiber cuts to the backbone, the first time that's happened to us."

Henriksen says every user on the Cogent network has connectivity and none are isolated. "A majority of our customers were BGP multi-homed so it wasn't that big of an issue," Henriksen says.

Latency on the Cogent network over the last four hours was at "Warning" status from Internet performance monitor Keynote, while network availability was "Critical." The Internet Storm Center states the outage is "major," with equipment problems in a Cogent data center in Washington, D.C., in addition to the fiber cuts.

Henriksen said he was not aware of any equipment outages.

"We have lit additional wavelengths along our northern routes to handle the increased capacity due to the New Orleans cut," Henriksen says.  "Latency has been reduced along all routes to below 125 [milliseconds] and should be fully restored to our average of below 43 ms when the cut is repaired within the hour."