Wall Street · AI Safety · The Atlantic Technology
Flammable liquid ignited, causing a fire that raised the temperature in the tunnel to somewhere between 1,000 to 1,500 degrees
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The National Transportation Safety Board investigated the fire but never figured out what went wrong.
Key facts
- On Wednesday, July 18, 2001, a freight train derailed in Baltimore’s Howard Street Tunnel
- Flammable liquid ignited, causing a fire that raised the temperature in the tunnel to somewhere between 1,000 to 1,500 degrees
- As the writer Maria Farrell and the technologist Robin Berjon note in their 2024 essay titled “ We Need to Rewild the Internet,” WorldCom—a major phone-and-internet company at the time—played
- In 2021, Fastly, a cloud-utility provider, stopped working for an hour, taking down the websites of major news outlets including CNN, The New York Times, and The Guardian
Summary
On Wednesday, July 18, 2001, a freight train derailed in Baltimore’s Howard Street Tunnel. The cables that wound their way through the tunnel were damaged, and web traffic as far away as Atlanta and Los Angeles slowed to a crawl. The internet isn’t what they think. In the case of the Howard Street Tunnel, the fragility became, without warning, obvious. As the writer Maria Farrell and the technologist Robin Berjon note in their 2024 essay titled “ We Need to Rewild the Internet,” WorldCom—a major phone-and-internet company at the time—played an important role in the outages that followed the inferno. Bottlenecks can have their benefits. In 2021, Fastly, a cloud-utility provider, stopped working for an hour, taking down the websites of major news outlets including CNN, The New York Times, and The Guardian.