Hurricane Sandy Proved How Hard It Is to Break the Internet - Arik Hesseldahl - News - AllThingsD

A timely Internet infrastructure reality check

"You’ll remember that the fundamental design principle of the Internet is that it routes traffic around failure automatically — supposedly, the legend goes, to enable it to keep running after a nuclear war. Well, the folks at Renesys watched that happen in real time, too. In its latest corporate blog post, it shows via a handful of colorful graphics how the traffic that would normally have run through New York took a different route, say from Paris to Washington D.C., or via Dallas to Palo Alto to get to India.
So what does it all prove? That the people who keep the Internet running do a pretty good job of it, even when a critical hub like New York takes on a lot of water."

Hurricane Sandy Proved How Hard It Is to Break the Internet - Arik Hesseldahl - News - AllThingsD