MaNAP Mitigates Manchester Meltdown

MANCHESTER, U.K. -- Prompt action by members of MaNAP, the UK’s northern Internet exchange, made certain that organisations disrupted by last week’s cable fires in Manchester were back in business with minimum delay.After vandals set fire to network cables in Salford a major ISP lost all Internet and e-mail access, whilst online bank Smile was unable to process credit card authorisations. Businesses and private users across north-west England were all affected by this loss of service when connection to a vital fibre cable link from Manchester to London was severed.Within 20 minutes of the alarm being raised, however, connections to the ISP were re-routed to allow traffic to flow once more, with MaNAP handling traffic flows nearly 50 per cent higher than previous peaks for several hours.MaNAP director and network operations consultant Steve Wilcox declared: “This incident underlines the importance of MaNAP as a national resource for Internet resilience and illustrates as well how members of this community are prepared to assist one another to keep traffic flowing. In this instance because the ISP was a member of MaNAP, the necessary infrastructure was physically in place and connections could be diverted by uploading the new configuration instructions to the MaNAP node. If, like many ISPs, they had only been a member of a London exchange they would not have had this restoration option.”