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Internet challenges today.

Apr 21, 2020 incarnate link
There are a number of problems impacting the stability of the Internet in north america today.

There have been weather related outages on the East Coast, a fiber cut near Chicago, and another fiber cut on the West Coast. One of the major severed routes was requiring running 3000ft of new fiber and won't be back online for hours.

This kind of thing usually happens to due construction, a backhoe digging in the wrong place, etc.

It's notable that the game itself has not been "down" at all today, we've never had a time when there weren't a lot of people online. But, there were definitely points where quite a few people dropped off at once, not because "our" internet service was broken, but because "everyone's" internet was broken.. many people having trouble reaching us, because of widely-impacting issues in greater network connectivity.

Basically, as self-healing as the networks and routing protocols may be, things still take a big hit when major fiber connections get cut; especially with several on the same day. Plus, in some cases capacity is already an issue, because of Stay At Home orders and the like.

Anyway, we're continuing to monitor things. If you experience issues today, it's probably not "the game", and it may not be "you", but rather somewhere in the vast morass of networks in between.