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Originally Posted by Flubflow
I was led to believe that if one or more parts of the internet infrastruscture fails then the traffic automatically gets rerouted elsewhere. This robustness was supposed to be a feature of the internet. Obviously not in the case of last night. The traffic must be being rerouted now as the main cable is still supposed to be knackered. Why did it take so long for the major ISPs to intervene and manually introduce a workaround? Who knows, but you can bet questions are being asked and hopefully they will have a better plan in future so that this sort of failure does not cause such a massive outage again (and pigs will fly over the NTL offices).
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apparently lightning does strike twice...
As TAT-14 is a dual, bi-directional ring of cable, a single serious fault should not be enough to break it, as traffic would still be able to flow between the countries on the ring.
Unfortunately, a part of the cable near the US coast had already suffered a technical fault earlier this month, which meant there was no built-in redundancy to cope with Tuesday's failure. According to BT, the US-side fault should be fixed by the end of this week, which will bring the cable network online again.