There are reports of a major failure in the main Transatlantic circuit
from the UK JANET academic network - which serves all universities and
some hundreds of other academic and related institutions and
organisations, including some national museums. There is no estimate yet
of the time that the connection will be "down".

E-mail will probably worm itself through the system somehow as usual
(that's precisely what the original Internet was designed to do - even if
the messages have to travel via e.g. Singapore and Tokyo or New Zealand
rather than direct from England to the US East Coast and Canada).

However, experience during the only previous major failure of the
JANET UK - USA link suggests that there could be significant delays (or
worse) on connections in either direction requiring greater capacity,
especially Web access.

Patrick Boylan