The Internet Under Crisis Conditions: Learning from September 11

Abstract

Although secondary to the human tragedy resulting from the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, telecommunications issues were significant that day both in terms of damage (physical as well as functional) and of mounting response and recovery efforts. The Internet has come to be a major component of the nation’s (and the world’s) communications and information infrastructure. People rely on it for business, social, and personal activities of many kinds, and government depends on it for communications and transactions with the media and the public. Thus there is interest in how the Internet performed and was used on September 11. Unlike the situation with longer-standing telecommunications services (notably the public telephone network), there are few regulations, policies, or practices related to the Internet’s functioning in emergency situations. Nor are there many publicly available data to help policy makers or the industry itself assess the Internet’s performance — either on a continuing basis or in the aftermath of a crisis. No regular system exists for reporting failures and outages, nor is there agreement on metrics of performance. Some experiences are shared informally among network operators or in forums such as the North American Network Operators Group (NANOG), but that information is not readily accessible for national planning or research purpos es. The decentralized architecture of the Internet — although widely characterized as one of the Internet’s strengths — further confounds the difficulty of collecting comprehensive data about how the Internet is performing. It is therefore unsurprising that no definitive analyses exist on the impact of September 11 on the Internet, though a few conflicting anecdotal reports about its performance that day — such as several presentations at NANOG indicating relatively little effect and press accounts suggesting that the impact was severe — have appeared.