Outage for some (but not Chronichosting)

[jmweb]

Anyone using Level3.net as a backbone might have experienced connection issues over the last hour. [You] might be experiencing an issue. This affects web hosting as well as some people's DSL Connection. Just a notice to everyone in case your sites down and your not sure why. It was a DDOS attack against level3.

[We] do use level3.net but our server remained online because we actually have 7 backbones and we don't just use level3.net as our backbone.

<<ADMIN NOTE: Portions of this post were removed and/or edited.>>

[Coloboy]

Found some more info,

The problems on Level 3 were most prominent at its facilities in San Diego and London, Keynote said. The company measured response times over eight seconds and availability below 60% at Level 3 facilities during the outage.

Level 3 says it serves 92 markets in the US and Europe, and has an 18,900 miles of network in the US, another 3,600 miles in Europe.

The company provides wholesale bandwidth, modem banks, and infrastructure services to a number of major US ISPs, including EarthLink and Covad Communications, both of which were hit by yesterday's outage.

EarthLink's support web site said at 6.50pm US Eastern Time: "Currently Level 3 is experiencing major problems on their network. This is causing us to see packet loss and latency across the board nationwide."

Unsubstantiated reports on DSLReports.com yesterday claimed that Level 3 had started blocking ICMP (internet control message protocol) packets during the outage, which could be suggestive of DDoS countermeasures.

It was further suggested that the incident may be connected to an ongoing packet war between groups of malicious hackers. However, any attack against a provider of Level 3's scale would have had to have been huge indeed, making the DDoS scenario seem unlikely.