Reply #15: It's the handoff between PCCW Global and DCANet [View All]

[DisgustipatedinCA]

It looks like Democraticunderground.com is hosted by DCANet, or is at least in their IP address space and administrative control (from an Internet routing perspective). Tracing to www.democraticunderground.com while this outage was occurring, it looks to me like the problem was at a "carrier hotel" (a facility where large Internet carriers meet and send and receive traffic from one another). The last "hop" I could reach was dcanet.ge2-4.br01.phl02.pccwbtn.net, which is a router owned by PCCW Global and connecting to DCANet's router. This is where the traffic died. I tried the same trace from a different source on the Internet (a public bgp route server), and got the same result. Now that the site is back up, it can be seen that the traffic is now passed along to core-2-gig-vlan-500.hq.dca.net, a router owned by DCANet, the people who host at least the IP addresses for DU.

So, although it's possible it was just DU that was affected, it's much more likely that everyone hosted by DCANet was down for awhile.