Hurricane Irene knocked out power to millions of homes and businesses as it travelled up the US East Coast this weekend. Even as the winds subsided, torrential rains triggered savage flooding throughout Eastern New York state and Vermont, tearing up roads and exposing the telecommunications infrastructure to further risks. The storm's impacts were clearly visible in the Internet's global routing table, as tens of thousands of networks were cut off from the rest of the world.
Here are a couple screenshots from our Internet Health Portal, which we provide to the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT). During an emergency like Hurricane Irene, this tool provides the US-CERT with critical information about the availability of Internet services across America. Working from lists of impacted customers in each state and county, and lists of correlated outage events, we can supply a lot of useful information about the problems being experienced by enterprises in the affected area. That information can be passed along to state and local governments to aid in prioritization of disaster relief.
This article is authored by James Cowie and originally posted on Renesys website