A Northeast Internet bottleneck
East Coasters, did you experience frustrating intermittent outages or slow Internet connections on Wednesday?
You are not alone.
A number of people in the Northeast reportedly experienced problems due to high traffic volume over AT&T's peering network with Abovenet, a network services provider.
"Wednesday we did have some congestion issues over the network with Abovenet," said AT&T spokesman Jason Hillary. "We saw abnormally high traffic over the peering network with Abovenet in both directions. We worked with Abovenet to reroute the traffic over different networks to ease the congestion. We are still working with Abovenet to investigate this issue and determine the cause of the traffic spot, to see if this is just an anomaly because of an unusual surge in traffic, or another issue. We are working to investigate that now."
While AT&T officially said the problem occurred between 1:30 p.m. EDT and 3:30 p.m. EDT, anecdotal stories from CNET's own IT professionals placed the issue as early as 7:30 a.m. EDT.
A spokesman for Abovenet said he was "not aware of any outages."
In a software-driven world, it's easy to forget about the nuts and bolts. Whether it's cars, robots, personal gadgetry or industrial machines, Candace Lombardi examines the moving parts that keep our world rotating. A journalist who divides her time between the United States and the United Kingdom, Lombardi has written about technology for the sites of The New York Times, CNET, USA Today, MSN, ZDNet, Silicon.com, and GameSpot. E-mail her at candacelombardi@gmail.com. She is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not a current employee of CNET. 
