It was the day America Online Inc. became America Offline. For 19 hours on Aug. 7, the world's biggest online company and its 6 million customers were blacked out while technicians tracked down what they described as two crippling problems: a faulty roadmap of Internet addresses and a bug in the software of a powerful switching computer called a router. In an apology to subscribers, Chairman Stephen M. Case wrote: "I would like to be able to tell you that this sort of thing will never happen again, but frankly, I can't make that commitment."
That's for sure. Preventing blackouts may actually get tougher as online services such as AOL--and the global network of networks known as the Internet--run ever closer to the limits of their capacity. Outages at overburdened Internet service providers have already become dismayingly common. Says Allan H. Weis, CEO of Advanced Network & Services, which sold its Internet service business to AOL last year: "Maybe for the first time in the history of the Internet, the demand is exceeding the supply that technology can deliver."
