The power outages that followed Hurricane Ike have produced the biggest outage of Internet service since the Northeast blackout of 2003, reports The Associated Press in a story in the San Francisco Chronicle.

While Texas, Ohio and Pennsylvania were the states hit hardest, Arkansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Kentucky, Illinois and Indiana felt the storm's brunt as well. Some of us here at IT Business Edge's Louisville, Ky., office are still experiencing those outages at home.

The story's based on information provided by Renesys Corp., which tracks the outages by "autonomous networks," rather than individual users. Such a network might be a university, a small carrier or part of a larger carrier's network.

At the peak Monday, Ike was blamed for outages of at least an hour in more than 400 networks. The Northeast blackout, by contrast, though, took out 2,500 networks.