Onvoy's message to its customer(s)

["Thomas T. Veldhouse" <veldy@visi.com>]

"December 10, 1999
Dear Onvoy Internet Customer:
We have some important news to share with you regarding your Internet
service. Due to the unprecedented growth of Onvoy and our customers, we are
presently suffering from congestion during peak traffic hours (8a.m. and
5p.m.) on all of our national Internet access lines. This congestion is
affecting Internet performance for all of our customers to varying degrees.
We sincerely apologize for this inconvenience. We began the process of
upgrading our connections for the fall growth in what we considered to be
adequate lead time. However, there have been unexpected delays and our
additional bandwidth has not been delivered in time to handle our fall
traffic growth. Furthermore, because our lines are at capacity, our network
is more vulnerable to the effects of "denial of service" attacks targeted at
some of our high-bandwidth customers. A denial of service attack is when
someone from the outside deliberately sends a large amount of traffic to a
destination on one of our customer's networks that exhausts the capacity of
their connection, effectively denying them access to anything else on the
Internet. We recently experienced such an attack earlier this week, which
caused periods of unusually slow performance..."

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Well, there's the scoop.

Tom Veldhouse
veldy@visi.com