Level 3 Network Falters Overnight

Level 3 Communications experienced what it called "widespread network instability" early Friday, causing problems for numerous ISPs and hosts that depend on Level 3 to serve traffic. According to posts on the NANOG mailing list, the issue may have centered on faulty maintenance in one of the Internet backbone's service centers.

The outage began at roughly 2AM ET, and lasted for several hours. Some reported problems with their connections up to seven hours after the initial failure. Level 3, which is one of the largest providers of Internet service in the country, offers dial-up and broadband at wholesale prices to its customers. Level 3 was most recently in the news for its spat with competitor Cogent over network traffic.