By: MarkJ - 11 December, 2009 (8:26 AM) - Score: 2617 - Fixed Line Broadband

The London Internet Exchange (LINX) suffered a major failure during yesterday afternoon after one of its crucial network switches was knocked offline by an unspecified software fault. Hundreds of UK and European Broadband ISPs connect through LINX's HUB and the impact upon Internet traffic during the fault is clearly visible in their usage graph below.


The graph shows the aggregated traffic that flows across all LINX switches and sites, together with what is probably an underestimate of the additional traffic that flows bilaterally between members across the LINX private interconnect (PI) service.

At its worst LINX lost just over 100Gbps of traffic to the outage, which is just over one third of its average normal load for the affected period. The service has since been returned to a normal and stable state of operation.