50 Ways to Crash the Net

On 17 July 1997, the Internet received a critical warning about its future, but that day and its lessons are already fading from memory. On that day, two blunders conspired to shut down the Internet for millions of users.

Early that morning, a system operator accidentally uploaded a corrupt database to the Internet's root domain servers. Until the problem was corrected, it was impossible to send email or access the Web within the .com and .net domains. The Internet was suddenly numeric, like the phone system. Forget about contacting http://www.hotwired.com - anybody trying to get to Synapse couldn't, unless they knew the numeric address of one of HotWired's servers.

The second snafu was more localized, but more severe for those affected. On that same Thursday morning, a construction crew in Virginia inadvertently sliced through a fiber-optic cable belonging to WorldCom and leased to Sprint. Many of Sprint's Internet customers in the mid-Atlantic states and New England couldn't get on the Net at all.

As someone affected by both outages, I spent most of the morning trying to figure out who to blame - and how to get my system operational again. But there was nothing I could do but wait.