Impact of Sandy on the Internet

While there has been much coverage of Sandy's devastation of NYC's transit systems and coastal communities, there has been an ongoing - and invisible - herculean effort to maintain and repair the Internet. A common realization for people without power is how important it is for absolutely everything in their daily life, and it is for this same reason that Internet is absolutely critical. Social media in particular, although often derided as frivolous, has become vital for those in search of food, medical help, fuel, and updates on the safety of loved ones, as well as a primary news source.

This storm has caused widespread outages for residential users as well as hosting for some pretty major websites, including Gizmodo, BuzzFeed, Jezebel, Gawker and Huffington Post.

Equinix, Internap, Datagram, Atlantic Metro, EZZI, Telehouse, Cogent all had major data centers down due to this.

Since NYC law prohibits large amounts of fuel above ground in high-rise buildings, many datacenters are forced to store their fuel tanks in the basement, while the generators are on higher floors. Due to limitations of pump design, the pumps must be within 1-2 floors of the tanks, though do not necessarily need to be in the basement. This was a major source of generator failures as once the pumps were submerged by floodwater, they were destroyed, and the generators lost access to fuel.

Unfortunately for one New York City datacenter, Peer1, their pumps were located in the basement, which was flooded. Peer1, however, did not accept the inevitabliltiy of the outage that was shortly coming as their mezzanine level diesel tank ran dry. Teams from Peer1, Fog Creek Software and SquareSpace organized a backbreaking effort hand carrying 5-gallon buckets of diesel up to the 18th floor generators keeping it supplied with the required 200 gallons per hour of fuel. As of their last updates they have fortunately aquired pumps capable of pumping their fuel up to their generators, though downtime may be required in the near future to remove contaiminants from their fuel filter likely introduced by the manual diesel filling process.

Even the prospect of utility power returning is not risk-free. When power initially returned at 111 8th Avenue, the voltage was fluctuating. Several suites switched from generator to Utility too soon, their UPS's were unable to handle the voltage irregularities, and powered off. This caused an outage for Telehouse's NYIIX Peering exchange.

Our thoughts and hearts go out to all the people at the affected companies working long tireless hours to keep the Internet running.

Who we are and how we were affected

ISPrime is a privately held professional managed service company which operates several data-center facilities. Our Weehawken, New Jersey facility is located about 5 minutes from Manhattan with multiple redundant fiber paths to a variety of transit providers and major Internet peering points in Manhattan and beyond. Through careful datacenter design and extensive planning, ISPrime has suffered no disruptions but was running without grid power on our diesel generators from late Monday until utility power was restored late Saturday.

Because of our proximity and our stability, we have an uninterrupted up-close view of how the Internet has handled this event and would like to help visualize some of these issues for the public.

How to read and understand this article

Generally we show two types of graphs on this article. One is showing the total number of networks reachable from an ISP, or a group of ISPs, or the internet as a whole. The other is a measurement of the amount of updates from an ISP, or a group of ISPs -- An "update" means that we have learned that a particular network is reachable, unreachable, or that the route to reach that network has changed.

These updates use CPU cycles on every router of every medium-to-large ISP in the world. An excessive number of updates can cause routers elsewhere in the world to exhaust CPU capabilities, and lose connectivity themselves.