It was the largest area to lose its connections to the Internet since the Northeast blackout of 2003, said data engineer Martin Brown at Renesys.
The Manchester, N.H.-based company doesn't track Internet connectivity by the number of people using it, but by "autonomous networks," which roughly equates to the "neighborhoods" of the global network. Each may represent a university or a small Internet service provider, or part of a larger carrier's network.
At the peak Monday, Ike had taken out more than 400 such networks for at least an hour each.
Some of the outages persisted Wednesday, with Time Warner Cable Inc.'s network in Ohio and NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston being affected, according to Renesys.
By comparison, the Northeast blackout took out 2,500 networks.
