Give your opinion, whether you agree or not:

Hurricane Sandy on 29 October 2012 caused serious damage to the US internet infrastructure when it hit the East Coast. The damage created a noticeable effect on the overall health of the US internet infrastructure. There are always occasional network outages, an approximate 0.3% can be down on any given day. When the storm hit the east coast, 0.43 of the US connections stopped working.

Researching the outage to accumulate data, it demonstrated the resilience of the internet and the network design that would be capable of functioning from a massive Soviet nuclear strike and how natural disasters can still affect it.

New York and New Jersey suffered the greatest number of outages however New Jersey and Connecticut were able to repair their problems much more faster than the greater New York area whom suffered the longest period of down time (Clark, 2012). The condensed population in New York City area felt longer recovery of the network.

A total of 22 states and a large portion of Eastern Canada was affected by consequences of the storm impairing the internet in those areas (Ager, 2012). The cellphone towers also received a lot of damage which also interrupted the wireless network. Additional wireless connectivity issues happened when there was a power outage and two Verizon switching centers had to be turned of because their back up battery power was running out.

One of the big challenges was that the physical structure for power needed to be corrected before they could go ahead and fix user's internet services. While the internet companies started to fix the physical part of the network, some would still have to wait for commercial power for testing (Reardon, 2012).

The system was redundant enough to continue to find its paths but the physical part of the network structure took a lot of damage that affected the user. Network administrator had to go in and ensure the paths were configured and would recover quickly after the power outages were fixed. Interesting to me that the network in that area was built to withstand a nuclear attack due to how the domain controllers and switch building are located. The physical structure was very well laid out and though upon its creation. The network is able to maintain and reroute itself ensuring the best connectivity possible through the physical cables that are in place. Ultimately the network was fixed but in some areas the effects of the damage lasted for weeks.