Did anyone else in the Midwest notice a brief internet outage or connectivity blip today? We saw a short interruption across multiple ISPs in northern Minnesota, followed by another outage around 2:43 PM affecting one local provider. Reports from Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, North Dakota, and nearby areas suggest the issue may have involved a regional network hub or data center rather than individual customer connections.
4 Answers
We had only a short blip in western Wisconsin, while other locations stayed down for an hour or more. There were also reports of a separate Lumen fiber cut and issues in the Pacific Northwest, so not every outage may have had the same cause.
This affected more than just home internet. State agencies, colleges, hosted services, voice systems, and some flight-related services reported interruptions. The Minneapolis internet exchange has a large peer list, so a power or connectivity problem there could create a much wider cascade across regional providers.
The likely source was a power problem at the 511 data center in Minneapolis. Equipment there went onto battery power, and connectivity to the MICE exchange plus upstream carriers went down. Several providers and transit links were affected even when their own customer equipment still had power. Power was reportedly restored later in the afternoon, with most services recovering around 3 PM Central.
Our equipment never lost power, but the upstream connections did. It definitely looked like a facility or carrier-side issue rather than a local ISP outage.
We saw simultaneous drops at sites in Minnesota and Wisconsin, and several people in Iowa and North Dakota reported brief interruptions too. Monitoring showed route and hop-count changes across the region, so traffic may have been rerouted while the exchange and carrier connections were unavailable.
That matches what we saw: some routes were unreachable for a few minutes, while other destinations stayed online. Everything returned fairly quickly once alternate paths came up.
We were in the same facility and lost power for nearly an hour. Our systems gradually came back as the building recovered.