ISP battle leaves thousands with reduced Net use (Techworld / Matthew Broersma)

From the article: “A dispute between two of the Internet’s biggest service providers has exploded into the public arena after a large number of business and consumer customers saw their Net use curtailed.

The first customers knew of the dispute was on Wednesday morning, when ISP Level 3 terminated its peering agreement with Cogent. The loss of this direct link meant that a portion of each network’s users could not contact anything hosted on the other network, including websites, other types of servers and e-mail addresses.”

This sort of thing is never pretty. Fortunately for people in Australia there should be no impact on traffic because domestic providers who buy traffic from the US typically multihome to 2 or more networks.