Since the last time we had a really major earthquake in California predates the rise of the Internet, this will be the first time for us. What happens when the fault lets go, folks?
http://www.iflscience.com/environment/Major-California-Faults-Ready-To-Rupture
You should restate the "predates"; I was on console on earthquake.berkeley.edu at the time Loma Prieta let go, using among other things (then) Forumnet (now) ICB in a chat, and one of the immediate damage indications was that everyone at UC Santa Cruz dropped offline.
Topic important, though, I live near the Hayward Fault now, and all my customers and most of their data are in the shake zone.
George William Herbert
No I should just clarify that by "rise of the Internet", I meant the internet becoming a part of everyday life and the utility. Which didn't happen until about 96.
…and I was one of those people at UCSC, who had an interesting little adventure driving home to Berkeley the next day.
Also, there are probably people in Northridge and Napa who might dispute your definition of “major,” but yes,a I take your point.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_Northridge_earthquake
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Baja_California_earthquake
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_South_Napa_earthquake
-Bill
You should restate the "predates"
Kenjiro Cho, Cristel Pelsser, Randy Bush, Youngjoon Won, The Japan
Earthquake: the impact on traffic and routing observed by a local ISP,
ACM CoNEXT 2011 Special Workshop on the Internet and Disasters. December
6, 2011. http://archive.psg.com/111206.conext-quake.pdf
How widespread were the effects on backbone communication circuits from those quakes?
Nothing that I recall. Sean might know better.
-Bill
Loma Prieta, very little; the UCSC line was a non-redundant T1 from San Jose BARRNET, and the other leaf nodes off that were down. As I recall the San Jose / SF to LA links were all golden.
Phone service to Santa Cruz was down, then spotty, then up over the course of a day, but every line was jammed with people checking in so connect rates sucked. The UCSC point to point T1 had to be manually repaired I think. The telco lines had alternate routes for calls and made it work, in a bit.
Northridge a few years later more or less flattened a C&W center just about at ground zero. CRL's pager-happy 24x7 MUD customer in Atlanta woke me up a minute later, and our lines through LA (and many others' lines) were down for a while. Dynamic routing was a little less dynamic then; I don't know what others did in great detail.
CIX lists buzzed etc. I think that predates nanog as a list by a few months, but memory is fuzzy.
George William Herbert
This was my recollection as well. Many corporate PBXes failed, and as
it happened, for some reason, the mobile towers functioned with excess
capacity, to the point where I had a line coming out of my car. Best
form of communication into and out of the region during the crisis was
the Internet. No surprise. That's what it was designed for.
Eliot
Northridge cut a section out of the Santa Monica freeway, which took out
a bunch of cable (I think by then it was mostly fiber) between USC and
points west; that got Cerfnet's connections to several west LA customers
(I worked for one of them in Culver City at the time). I kind of
remember that they restored it by routing through Los Nettos. At home I
was using the Cerfnet Caltech pop at the time, and had an outage for an
hour or two (and lost power for about that long). The windstorm a few
years later cut lots of above-ground fiber, though; lots more outages
than any earthquake.
I recall that CSUN was pretty well cut off (both net and roads) for a while.
I don't recall if the Hector Mine quake cut any fiber but there is a
repeater building near the railroad just east of the fault-line
crossing. There wasn't a ground break that far north so the cables
probably weathered it OK but the building might not have. (amazing to
have a 7.4 or so quake that almost didn't injure anyone; almost all the
damage was from the derail of the southwest chief westbound.)
And Jim wins the Internet for this weekend.
Cheers,
-- jra