Series of Errors Halts Internet Traffic

Traffic on much of the Internet ground to a halt after a series of human errors, including an unprecedented glitch at Virginia company that maintains the Internet’s address registry and the accidental severing of an important data line. For much of Thursday, Web sites throughout the U.S. were inaccessible and millions of electronic mail messages bounced back to their senders. The events added up to one of the largest’s failures the burgeoning global computer network has faced. Although a small but vocal minority of Internet specialists have been predicting the network will suffer a meltdown because of booming traffic, some computer experts said the problems were not the result of a flaw in the network’s design. “What occurred . . . wasn’t a technical problem,” said David Graves of Network Solutions Inc., the Herndon, Va., company that registers Internet addresses. “It was a human problem.” But the event, said some experts, illustrates how dependent the Internet is on one company. Though the Internet was designed with no central control, giving it the ability to reroute traffic if one part of the network goes down, it remains dependent on accurate data from Network Solutions to know where to route it to.