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Here's another quick view of the impact on the routing table as Sandy came ashore Monday night. Each square represents the fate of a set of networks geolocated within a common tenth-degree square of the Earth's surface — at these latitudes, that's about 90 square kilometers.

At one end of the scale, the darkest green indicates better than 99.95% of the networks are available. At the other end, solid red indicates that more than 5% of the networks at that location have been removed from the global routing table, meaning that they can't be reached by anyone.

Five percent doesn't sound like much, but consider the Internet density in the affected areas! In fact, Manhattan's outage rates were much higher — on the order of 10%, which is impressively low given the fact that ConEd cut power to much of the island. Silencing ten percent of the networks in the New York area is like taking out an entire country the size of Austria, in terms of impact on the global routing table. The 90% that survive are in data centers, running on generator power supplied by engineers who do not sleep much.

It's striking to observe not only the impacts in NYC, Long Island, and New Jersey, but also peripheral weather-related outages in the Washington DC area, and up the I-93 corridor from Boston into New Hampshire. The Internet has become a sensor network in its own right for determining where storm damage is occurring — and since BGP routing converges in realtime, that information literally becomes available within a few seconds.

Last night, a pipeline carrying Iranian natural gas to Turkey was damaged by an explosion, halting gas flow, and perhaps surprisingly to some, disrupting Internet connectivity to northern Iran and Iraq. The Turkish government has accused the Kurdistan Workers party (PKK) militant group, who have claimed responsibility for pipeline explosions in the past, of perpetrating the attack.

Internet communications lines are often installed along existing physical routes, such as highways, power lines, rail lines or oil and gas pipelines. Since someone has gone to the trouble of establishing a right of way and clearing a path over hundreds of kilometers, the telecommunications folks often take the opportunity to lay fiber optic cable along the route, if at all possible.

The popular torrent site The Pirate Bay (TPB) suffered a widespread outage today as reported by several media outlets: BBC, TorrentFreak, PC Magazine, ZDNet, The Huffington Post and many others.

To understand why The Pirate Bay disappeared, we'll look at them from a routing perspective, noting that without widely accepted routes to their IP space, they will lack global connectivity. TPB operates an autonomous system, AS 51040, which has two Internet service providers, namely, ROBTEX (AS 48285) and Serious Tubes Networks (AS 50066). TPB also has several peers, the most prominent of which is Hurricane Electric (AS 6939). To provide their services, The Pirate Bay originates two IP networks or prefixes: 194.14.56.0/24 (Pirate Networks) and 194.71.107.0/24 (The Pirate Bay). The 194.14.56.0/24 prefix appears to be TPB's core network, while 194.71.107.0/24 appears to host TPB's main domains, such as piratebay.net, piratebay.org, thepiratebay.com etc.