Level 3 Outage - October 4, 2016 - Star2Star One of First to Restore Service

Backbone carrier Level 3 says it is investigating the cause of an outage that took out its services in North America.

A spokesperson for the network provider advised that the issue was resolved by 11:30am US Eastern time. The problems largely affected Level 3 VoIP and phone services in the East Coast and Midwest regions.

A heat map (above) from monitoring site DownDetector showed the extent of the outage for much of the US and Canada:

The problems were also severe enough to impact the services of other phone carriers that rely on Level 3 interconnects to handle their traffic.  Star2Star was able to create a work around and be one of the first to restore service for its customers in a little more than an hour.

While Level 3 services have since returned and customers are reporting their phone lines working again, the cause of the downtime is still unknown.