Internet Traffic Reports

December 23, 2004 11:24 AM

Internet Traffic Reports? I know there's a site where Internet Traffic figures are posted, but is there a site that offers news about Internet "incidents." For example, right now, the Yahoo Group I belong to is either very impaired, or completely down. And, while it's somewhat pointless (sort of like schedules for the subway--hey it comes when it comes), I'd like to know WHY.
posted by ParisParamus to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

Internet Weather Report

I used to work at Matrix.net, which reported abnormal internet latency/reachability issues -- but unfortuantely Keynote bought that division and integrated into their for-pay products.
posted by fourstar at 12:44 PM on December 23, 2004

The North American Network Operators' Group (NANOG) is a mailing list for the guys who run the Internet backbone. They'll normally talk about outages that affect them and explain what happened. List archives here.
posted by dkf at 2:40 PM on December 23, 2004

No public Internet traffic/weather reports are going to tell you why something at Yahoo Groups is malfunctioning, though, and it would be odd for a mailing list to malfunction because of anything they'd chart -- they're all much more basic (does the packet arrive? how long does it take?) than any of the things you use on the Internet. Unfortunately, with Yahoo you get what you pay for, so there's no one-stop address for asking about system problems. Answer "No" to "Did this help you?" on any Groups Help page and you'll get a support request form.
posted by mendel at 5:43 PM on December 23, 2004

Response by poster: Mendel: I agree, which was the point of my post. There's no central place for people to report "outages," be they on the Internet, proper, or within some major ISP or portal's infrastructure? You'd think there should be. Hello, entrepreneurial types....HELLO.....
posted by ParisParamus at 8:42 PM on December 23, 2004

I think it's just a matter of scale. The perception that a free Yahoo Group isn't working right doesn't interest enough people for something like that to develop. Free services act like free services; one not working occasionally is a dog-bites-man story. To use an offline example, while there are definitely commercial information clearinghouses for North American power distribution outages, there probably aren't any for blown transformers in individual neighbourhoods.

There are mailing lists like nanog's for North American internetworking issues and incidents for reports of security-related incidents, plus clearinghouses like CERT for wide-scale security-related operational issues and end-user forums like DSLreports for broadband users, but one free hosted application at one company just doesn't generate the interest necessary for a similar sort of thing.
posted by mendel at 10:36 PM on December 23, 2004

Response by poster: Mendel, I wasn't suggesting the site would be limited to Yahoo; in any case, the outage seems to be much broader since I've received noticibly less e-mail in the last 24hrs, even while being able to sent and receive mail between AOL, GMail and .Mac accounts.
posted by ParisParamus at 7:49 AM on December 24, 2004

Response by poster: DSL reports might be a good model. But when AOL goes down/brown, or, for that matter, Metafilter goes off line for DAYS, it might be nice for there to be a place to turn for an answer--it's not like there aren't Web sites devoted to more stupid ends...
posted by ParisParamus at 7:58 AM on December 24, 2004

this request rang a bell with me. wasn't there something vaguely like this many (~10?) years ago (maybe the net was small enough then)? anyway, whatever it was, i think it closed down.
posted by andrew cooke at 8:22 AM on December 24, 2004

tracert?
posted by juv3nal at 2:58 PM on December 24, 2004