Level 3 fiber network outage disrupts Internet traffic in the U.S. and Europe

Level 3 suffered a fault on its fiber network on Friday that slowed down Internet services in a number of U.S. markets and four European countries--including the UK, France, Germany and Italy.

According to a Computer Weekly report, the outage affected a number of websites such as eBay and Yahoo Mail, and gaming services on PSN and Xbox Live.

In order to mitigate the slowdown, various ISPs have disabled transit across Level 3's network.

One of the service providers that was affected by the outage was Southampton, UK-based VoIP wholesale provider Simwood. The service provider said in a blog post on Friday that it re-enabled "Level 3 but will continue to monitor" after having to temporarily disable its ports to the service provider.

Simwood said that the issue may have originated in the Far East, where a leak in border gateway protocol (BGP) traffic between Telekom Malaysia and Level 3 drove up BGP packet losses.

Level 3 confirmed on Twitter late on Friday that its network and ISP customers experienced disruptions in EMEA and other global regions.

"Level 3's network, alongside some other ISPs, experienced service disruptions affecting customers in EMEA [Europe, Middle East and Africa] and globally on June 12th," the company said in a statement. "Maintaining a reliable, high-performing network for our customers is our top priority. Our network technicians worked to resolve the issue, and services have been widely restored. The root cause has been isolated and linked back to an Asian provider issue; we are working closely together to address this and prevent it from recurring."

Level 3 had not responded by press time to FierceTelecom's request for a comment on the current network status.

For more:
- Computer Weekly has this article
 
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