11-07-2004 - Upstream provider problem communicating with major portions of Internet

11-07-2004
There is an ongoing network problem with one of our upstream providers having to do with communicating with one of the major Internet backbone providers. This will cause some Internet sites to be unreachable at times. Other Internet sites reachable via another backbone provider are unaffected.

We are currently working with technicians from our upstream provider to reroute Internet traffic away from the affected networks to restore access to the previously unreachable Internet sites.

Any additional updates will be posted as soon as we have them. We apologize for the inconvenience and are working to resolve this issue.

11-08-2004: 12:30 am EST
This outage is still occuring. At this time approx 3/5 of the Internet is solidly reachable. The remaining 2/5 is intermitently reachable. We have spent the evening working with various upstream providers trying to find a solution. Currently we are bringing in hardware manufacture technical support to make sure this isn't a hardware issue.

We will be continuing to work this issue until it is fully resolved.

11-08-2004: 4:45 am EST
A few minutes ago, this situation stabilized. At this time we are not sure what the root cause of the trouble was. We still have open tickets with Cisco trying to find the source of this outage so we can prevent it in the future.

Please accept our appologies for the outage.

Date: Mon,  8 Nov 2004 09:32:33 -0500
Subject: [SUPPORT] Widomaker Service Outage  11/07/04


Yesterday, 11/7/04, at approx 11 am, Widomaker customers started experiencing
difficulty hitting significant portions of the Internet.  This outage was
resolved at 4:32 am on 11/8/04.

During this period, approximately 3/5 of the Internet was intermittently
inaccessible.  At times, you would be able to get to a certain website just
fine.  30 seconds later, you could get to that same website, albeit at a very
slow crawl.  30 seconds later, the website was completely inaccessible.  30
seconds later, all would be fine again.  During this time, the remaining 2/5 of
the Internet was reachable as if nothing was wrong.

Depending on where on the Internet you were trying to go, you may or may not
have seen this outage.  Some of the more popular websites that were unavailable
through us were www.cnn.com, www.microsoft.com and www.yahoo.com.

Given the on again, off again nature of this problem, troubleshooting was rather
difficult.  At times we had technicians from 3 upstream providers, 2 telephone
companies and 2 equipment manufactures all looking at this issue.

Regrettably, this outage "healed" itself without any overt action by any of us.
Due to this, I can not be certain that this type of outage will not occur
again.  Our current working theory is that we have triggered an obscure bug in
Cisco's (our equipment manufacture) routing software.  We continue to have open
tickets with Cisco in chasing this down.

Please accept our apologies for this outage.  Here at Widomaker we strive to
ensure that you, our customer, are as isolated as possible from these types of
outages.  Please rest assured that once we find the cause of this, we will make
every effort to ensure it does not reoccur.


Benjamin F. Loyall
President
Widomaker Communication Services, Inc.