Major internet backbones and websites have so far withstood the massive power blackout, a network analysis group, Keynote Systems, said on Thursday.
Keynote said its monitoring of all major US Internet backbones from the 25 largest US cities showed no difficulties and major websites were accessible and performing normally.
A few news sites, such as www.usatoday.com and www.cnn.com, had minor problems at the start as masses of surfers scrambled for information, but they quickly recovered, it said.
”As is true of the telephone system, the internet and major websites have been engineered with redundancy and backup power systems to withstand power outages,” said Keynote internet analyst Eric Siegel.
”It’s not surprising that a power outage, no matter how widespread, didn’t appreciably affect the internet and the web,” he said in a statement.
”As long as there isn’t major physical damage, such as that caused by the July 2001 Baltimore tunnel fire, or major congestion, such as that caused by the SQL Slammer worm in January 2003, the internet and the web have enough redundancy and resilience to withstand most problems.”
Industry analysts at Cert Coordination Centre rejected speculation that a fast-spreading internet virus might have triggered the mass US and Canadian power blackouts.
”There is no information available at this time to indicate that the power outages in the northeast United States and Canada are related to intruder activity,” the Cert Coordination Centre said.
”The Cert/CC will continue to monitor the situation,” said a statement by the centre, which is part the Software Engineering Institute of Carnegie Mellon University.
The centre said it was responding to questions about whether the US and Canadian blackouts were related to the recent W32/Blaster worm or other intruder activity. – Sapa-AFP