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From: malis@CCS.BBN.COM (Andrew Malis)
Newsgroups: mod.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re: Arpanet outage
Message-ID: <8612151909.AA08972@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: Mon, 15-Dec-86 10:46:48 EST
Article-I.D.: ucbvax.8612151909.AA08972
Posted: Mon Dec 15 10:46:48 1986
Date-Received: Tue, 16-Dec-86 21:41:45 EST
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Charles,

What happened is as follows:

At 1:11 AM EST on Friday, AT&T suffered a fiber optics cable
break between Newark NJ and White Plains NY.  They happen to have
routed seven ARPANET trunks through that one fiber optics cable.
When the cable was cut, all seven trunks were lost, and the PSNs
in the northeast were cut off from the rest of the network.
Service was restored by AT&T at 12:12.

The MILNET also suffered some trunk outages, but has more
reduncancy, so it was not partitioned.

Regards,
Andy Malis