Another Friday night and I ain't got

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Read more! no internet... Another big system failure, but it also says something about how the internet is viewed by the media
This blog post can be read at 5tth.blogspot.com

On Friday night there was feeling of Deja Vu. Three weeks ago my internet slowed to walking pace, on Friday night it stopped altogether. It seems, that once again the fault lies with BT, a `node failure' was to blame. The number of people affected was reported by the BBC to be tens of thousands... elsewhere 1.2 million was quoted. The twitterati went for the higher figure and judging by the fact that the effects seemed to go wider than just BT's own domestic customers, I saw Plusnet given as an example, and I'm with Virgin, that higher number seems feasible.

Offering further comment on the fact that the whole episode was down to a failure (probably an equipment failure) at a BT exchange is probably superfluous.

What did strike me was how long it took the conventional media to report this story, and not realise the importance of it.

When my main internet supply failed, I plugged in my Orange dongle and went in search of references to the outage. There was nothing on any of the news websites, so I did what I would normally do in these circumstances.... I turned to Twitter, searched `outage' and slowly at first my suspicions were confirmed... and I have to say that I was relieved to find that it wasn't my wireless router which had blown up.

The first hint that the conventional media was across it was a tweet from the Guardian's Charles Arthur, saying that something seemed to be amiss and saying he would investigate.

As Mrs H pointed out to me, if everybody's internet had gone belly up, then they would have been prevented from reporting it on their websites, because those websites would have been `unupdateable'

Fair point, but there didn't seem to be anything on the broadcast media either.

Eventually a small story appeared on the BBC News website at about 2300, the outage had occurred about three hours earlier.

I have to say that it struck me that if the figure of 1.2 million users being left without the internet was correct then this is a much bigger story, but it did happen in Southern Scotland and Northern England, so it was a long way from London... Even if it was tens of thousands of people, rather than 1.2 million, that lower figure would have been newsworthy if it had been electricity which had been lost, so why not internet? Read more!

BT takes IDNet down

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Read more! No-one else seems to have reported it, so I will. Last night, just before 8pm, IDnet, which serves a considerable number of homes and businesses around the country, went kerflump.

This blog post can be read at 5tth.blogspot.com



Last night, after trying several different routers, I for one was damned glad to have an ISP who answer their phone at 10pm on a Sunday eve. "Yep, we're all down. It's something to do with BT Central, and no time is yet being given for restoration of services." So, early night then as unable to work. (Oh yes, that'll be because the mobile coverage in this rural area isn't sufficient to make mobile broadband an option, and there is no 3G here, whatever the coverage maps say, nor is it possible to have a second broadband line to the office as...yep, you've guessed it, no spare lines in the village!).

This morning, the system is back up and working and the idnet network status messages read as follows:

"2010-10-10 20:21: Both our Primary and Backup Broadband links into BT are currently down. BT are aware of the failure and are investigating. We do not as yet have a time estimate from them for a fix. We will provide an update as soon as we get one."

"2010-10-11 01:46: Service has now been restored. We are demanding a full explanation from BT.
2010-10-10 23:59: BT confirm both circuits tested OK. They are now diagnosing their internal network routing.
2010-10-10 22:18: BT now have engineers onsite in the Exchange diagnosing the problem."

But better is yet to come.

"2010-10-11 08:10: BT have admitted that someone removed the configuration for our circuits yesterday. We and (sic) demanded that they investigate why this happened, what safeguards will now be put in place to ensure that it can't happen again and why it took them so long to resolve the issue."

I don't know exactly how many customers idnet serve, but if it hadn't been a Sunday night, no doubt there would be others reporting the outage, including Govt agencies looking at that link above.

I look forward to the explanation from BT. And it clearly highlights how no country should rely on a private company that could prove to be the single point of failure.
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