It's an interesting dilemma that you have highlighted - when an ISP suffers routing problems, how can they alert their customers (and what's the point)?

Well it obviously can't be a 'major outage' except mqaybe for some areas, as I've been unaffected.

In reply to a post by BatBoy:

It's an interesting dilemma that you have highlighted - when an ISP suffers routing problems, how can they alert their customers (and what's the point)?

I don't have a solution, obviously. Although it strikes me that a little more redundancy when it comes to Status reporting (eg.. *NOT* hosting the Status page on your own network!) might be a start.

I think however a lot of people probably resort to Twitter and other social networks to find out what's going on, assuming they're accessible, although that just leads to a lot of repetition ("what's going on?" x 100's) so it's not the most efficient solution.

Needless to say a full page apology in the Evening Standard and Metro is the least I expect, and given the speed at which BT fix their major faults they should be able to make the first edition before full service is restored.

What does annoy me even more, though, is that BT claim to have been unaware of this fault for almost 12 hours, when even the most basic monitoring/testing should have identified there was a major routing issue within the network almost as soon as it occurred. Or, equally as bad, BT have known about the problem since it first started and have been working on it for the last 12+ hours, but chose not to proactively inform their customers that there was a major fault, and simply waited for the customers to discover it for themselves.

I am with BT and I was fine last night, even accessing this site.

So maybe the issue was in your area and not all BT customers.

Paul

You subscribe to a residential provider, you get residential service...

BT have been keeping everybody in the loop via Twitter, other broadband new sites have also been tweeting about this too...

Last I read, East Midlands, South East and East Anglia affected... however it's only "some" that are affected...

Routing issues are complicated for all providers, Zen had a routing issue for me that was only corrected the other day after it started caring bad growing and packet loss... however I had to make Zen aware of this.

Glad I'm not the only person to have noticed the problem. It started around 9-10pm last night....as is still there.

Many web sites simply give ' web site not available'...many are very slow. I had no idea if it was a problem at my end, or what. I restarted the router, kicked my computer, all to no avail. And the worst aspect is that I cannot see anything anywhere saying there is either an internet problem or a BT problem in my area ( Sevenoaks ).

In reply to a post by Milhouse:

Yes, however the problem existed for almost 12 hours before BT finally acknowledged it, and yet not a single post here - I guess I'm just a little surprised that this site isn't as active as it used to be, maybe a sign of the times.

Yes, the same issue started for me last night and is still affecting my connection. I am in the South East so the service status is accurate in my case. It bears all the hallmarks of the issue in July, TCP connections to many hostnames very slow or failing altogether despite DNS resolving quickly, and it is not something I experienced with any ISP until I joined BT.

For instance, some of my mailboxes are unable to connect to POP3 to get mail. The BT forum and the Microsoft website load very slowly, and when they do load they look all messed up like the css stylesheet failed to load. Pages on this forum are very slow to load too.

Last time it took them two days to fix, I hope they can fix it quicker this time.

Edited by Oliver341 (Tue 17-Nov-15 12:35:20)

"BT have been keeping everybody in the loop via Twitter"

That's nice of them...but Twitter is one of the web sites that doesn't come up. Indeed...I had the absurd irony last night that my wife was happily watching stuff on Netflix via wireless ( from the same router ) right next to me on her laptop...whilst Netflix gave me ( connected to the router via Ethernet ) ' web site does not exist'

I've been pinging a couple of sites that have been incommunicado on BT since at least 1am (no response to pings whatsoever) and they've just burst into life replying to pings (and are now fully visible) so maybe the fault has just been fixed in the last few minutes... bravo BT...

Yup, the POP3 box which was failing has just started connecting for the first time in 15 hours.