Level 3 celebrates $34bn CenturyLink gobble by blacking out Eastern US Network provider Level 3 Communications appears to be wrangling with a widespread outage in the US this morning. The backbone carrier says it is "looking into" the cause of an outage that, according to connectivity monitoring service DownDetector, is hitting customers across a large swath of the east coast and the southeastern …
Carrier diversity?
You may have carrier diversity in place, but do you have peering diversity?
All well have 15 carriers, but if at some point they rely on Level3 then you have issues.
In the UK it would be similar to saying it's OK I have Virgin and Vodaphone, so I won't be affected if BT's entire backbone fails.
Suffice it to say that, in the northeastern US, true end-to-end carrier diversity is QUITE available. There are resellers that vend a mixture of circuits (usually to meet a price). Certainly the internet can have surprising conduit non-diversity. Most companies do business with backup circuits that have clear carrier separation, though.
The outage comes at a particularly inopportune time for Level 3, which earlier this week officially announced it had agreed to a $34bn acquisition by US telecom giant CenturyLink.
^^^ I think that's what this in the article stated. CenturyLink is buying Level3. Although the previous article (http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2016/10/31/centurylink_set_to_merge_with_tierone_provider_level_3_for_34bn/) indicates that it's a "merger".
Hmm.... I guess Level3 is just giving their customers a taste of the future with CenturyLink?
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