Did anyone else notice brief internet or connectivity outages across Minnesota and the surrounding Midwest? We saw a short interruption in northern Minnesota, followed by another outage on a local ISP around 2:43 PM. Reports ranged from a few seconds to more than an hour, affecting multiple providers, data centers, VPNs, state services, and some sites in Wisconsin, Iowa, North Dakota, and beyond. Does anyone know what caused it?
4 Answers
Several organizations reported interruptions to state networks, VPNs, voice systems, and hosted services during the same window. The Minneapolis interconnection site has a large peer list, so losing power or redundancy there would explain why unrelated providers and services all experienced short outages.
The likely cause was a power issue at the 511 building in Minneapolis, a major carrier and interconnection site. Equipment there reportedly switched to battery power, and connectivity to the MICE core and several upstream carriers dropped. Power was apparently restored later in the afternoon, with most equipment recovering around 3:00–3:30 PM Central.
This looked bigger than a single ISP outage. Sites in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, North Dakota, and parts of the Twin Cities reported brief drops, while some routes changed dramatically and latency increased. A major exchange or carrier-hotel problem could easily cause that kind of cascading impact without every local circuit losing power.
That matches what we saw: several routes shifted at the same polling interval, but not every monitored site went completely offline.
There also appear to have been separate carrier problems happening around the same time, including a Lumen fiber cut and outages involving major transit providers. Some locations were back within a few minutes, while others remained offline for an hour or more, so this may have been overlapping incidents rather than one outage affecting everyone equally.
We were in that facility too and lost power for close to an hour. Other customers nearby stayed online, probably because their equipment had different backup arrangements.