In figure 13, could that “shark fin” spike have anything to do with last weeks power grid failure (Blackout 2003), and subsequent “rolling” restoration?
No, it did not coincide with the blackout that affected the east coast in August 2003. However, I did look for evidence of the blackout in the netgear SNTP traffic, and found only slight less during the outage. Relatively little of the Internet was actually affected by the power outage. Early reports were that only a few thousand BGP prefixes from only a couple hundred autonomous systems were offline. Those that were offline were unreachable in both directions, so we didn’t receive requests from them until power was returned. The rolling restoration served to distribute the load to our server as those netgear clients came online.
