Global Crossing
company
Global Crossing Limited was a telecommunications company that provided computer networking services and operated a tier 1 carrier. It maintained a large backbone network and offered peering, virtual private networks, leased lines, audio and video conferencing, long-distance telephone, managed services, dialup, colocation centres and VoIP. Its customer base ranged from individuals to large enterprises and other carriers, with emphasis on higher-margin layered services such as managed services and VoIP with leased lines. Its core network delivered services to more than 700 cities in more than 70 countries.
Global Crossing was the first global communications provider with IPv6 natively deployed in both its private and public networks. It was legally domiciled in Bermuda and had its administrative headquarters in New Jersey.
In 1999, during the dot-com bubble, the company was valued at US$47 billion, but it never had a profitable year. In 2002, the company filed for one of the largest bankruptcies in history and its executives were accused of covering up an accounting scandal. On October 3, 2011, Global Crossing was acquired by Level 3 Communications for $3 billion, including the assumption of $1.1 billion in debt.
History
Founding and early growth
In March 1997, Global Crossing was founded by Gary Winnick, the former manager of the bond desk of Drexel Burnham Lambert, and his Drexel colleagues who moved on to work at Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC): Abbott L. Brown, David L. Lee, and Barry Porter. In 1997, the company raised $35 million, including investments by Winnick and the CIBC Argosy Merchant Funds (later Trimaran Capital Partners).
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Global Crossing” is company. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Global, Crossing and company, not as a finished interpretation.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q597681. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1999, 2002, 2011 and 1997.
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This entry incorporates text from “Global Crossing” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.