Hurricane Sandy not only knocked out power, displaced millions of people and left billions of dollars worth of damage in its wake, it also systematically caused internet connections all over the Eastern United States to go down.
Intelligence firm Renesys examined the systematic take down of internet hubs and then displayed that information in the form of a short animated video.
The video showcases status updates from various web hubs around the Eastern part of the United States from October 29 through October 30. The short video changes each hub from active (green) to inactive (red) as each hub shuts down.
According to Renesys :
“More than 5% of the networks at that location have been removed from the global routing table, meaning that they can’t be reached by anyone.”
On its website, the company writes:
“Five percent doesn’t sound like much, but consider the Internet density in the affected areas! In fact, Manhattan’s outage rates were much higher — on the order of 10%, which is impressively low given the fact that ConEd cut power to much of the island. Silencing ten percent of the networks in the New York area is like taking out an entire country the size of Austria, in terms of impact on the global routing table. The 90% that survive are in data centers, running on generator power supplied by engineers who do not sleep much.”
Here is the full internet hub shutdown notice for Hurricane Sandy :
[iframe width=”420? height=”315? src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/-MxzQcT7fLQ”]
We tried to visit Gawker and BuzzFeed during Hurricane Sandy; instead, the only news that seemed to be trending was their 404 pages.
