Hurricane Sandy continued to take a toll on internet infrastructure in New York City and beyond on Tuesday.
The specter of trouble with the undersea cables could be a huge deal, although experts said that there is so much redundancy that much of the risk is mitigated. There were some reports attributed to cable operators who said they had experienced power issues but back-up generators prevented service disruption.
Carriers and ISPs use the cables to pump data across the Atlantic. Two of the major gateways are in Brookhaven, N.Y., (on Long Island) and in northern New Jersey, where the cables come ashore. “Given the duration and strength of this storm, you have to worry about the cables getting disrupted,” said an exeutive with a data center company who did not want to be named. He said problems with the cables is “ the kind of thing companies will keep close to the vest. If either AC-1 or AC-2 were to go out there would be major, major issues.”
As already reported, data center facilities in lower Manhattan suffered a string of outages after flooding and Con Ed cut electrical power. Datagram, the web hosting company that serves the Huffington Post, Gawker, Gizmodo and BuzzFeed, went down Monday evening after flooding caused those sites to go dark. Data centers at Google-owned Carrier Hotel on 8th Avenue, including Equinix, XO Communications and others were also reportedly affected by power outages, though it appears some are back up and running. And Atlantic Metro Communications also reported disruptions due to flooding at a New York data center.
Ryan Kim contributed to this post.
Cable map courtesy of Telegeography.