For the last few days, my Internet connection has been gummy. It’s bad enough that I started researching other service providers in the Vegas area and discovered that WiMAX is now available here. (woo hoo!) But that’ll be another blog post.

After talking to various friends and acquaintances, I don’t think it’s just me. Nobody’s Internet is actually down, but everybody I talk to says their connection is slow. Nobody knows what’s going on, but I’ve run into speculation along these lines:

…the Internet is currently suffering a massive slowdown because the spam bots have gone out of control. The conclusion among some admins, at least, is that it’s caused by a bug in one of the zombie viruses (the ones that take over a Windows computer and turn it into a spam factory). Wherever the bots are coming from, it’s slowing down—and bringing down—servers. Including yours.

The result is that email that used to arrive in a few minutes is taking hours. Your servers may have hundreds or thousands of inactive connections that just sit there and don’t do anything but consume bandwidth. We’ve taken to calling them “barnacles,” and my techie spouse has written custom software to scrape ‘em off every so often. And even so, he tells me that the mail servers are running out of connections every five minutes.

If true, this is a hard problem to diagnose, let alone fix. In fact, we’re pretty much dependent on the authors of these bots to come up with a fix. I hope they’re as exasperated with the slow Internet as I am.

The good news is that, in my experience, the average competence of hacker types is far superior to that of most techies, so we may be in for a relatively quick fix. But best case, it will still take days to replicate a fix across the Internet to so many computers. Considering that the problems are spread across numerous bots, each written by different people, a worst-case scenario is that it would take weeks or even months.

For the rest of today, I’ll be catching up on my reading.