Anyone else see this "badness" last night?

My Broadband Ping
Clearly something nasty happened between 8pm and midnight. The only two users of my connection are my wife and myself, and we weren't online at all. This morning, the router had lost connection to plusnet, but bizarrely (and inexplicably!) my wife's VPN tunnel to her work was functioning fine. I did various traceroutes, mtrs, and pings from other computers and the router. Some of the traceroutes showed up random IP addresses from all over the net. others just stopped at the router. Eventually, I simply disconnected the router from the ONT, and then reconnected, to find that everything worked as expected. I'd kind of like some inkling of an idea about what went on. I've never seen anything like it in over 3 decades of using the internet. I speculate that something weird was going on at my exchange.

Were there any red lights on the ONT.

Its possible Plusnet had PPPOE issues and have now fixed the issue.
If all the green lights were on the ONT then it would have been a plusnet server issue (not fibre)

I would ignore it if it doesnt reoccur.

Edited by pyarwood (Fri 03-May-24 17:45:25)

All the ONT lights were green, one of them flickering.
I noticed that Ookla's drdowndetector showed a big bump of queries about plusnet, at about the same time. So, as you say, maybe server issues at plusnet.

The think that was weird though, was that my wifes VPN to her work worked (as far as she could tell) fine, while my (unVPN'd) connection was all over the place. Can plusnet servers distinguish VPN connections from other traffic, and give them priority? (I know next to nothing about VPNs).

In reply to a post by pi12ca:

All the ONT lights were green, one of them flickering.
I noticed that Ookla's drdowndetector showed a big bump of queries about plusnet, at about the same time. So, as you say, maybe server issues at plusnet.

The think that was weird though, was that my wifes VPN to her work worked (as far as she could tell) fine, while my (unVPN'd) connection was all over the place. Can plusnet servers distinguish VPN connections from other traffic, and give them priority? (I know next to nothing about VPNs).

More likely it was just using a different route at Plusnet to reach the work server than most traffic.

They can detect the traffic but VPN uses the work severs so if plus net were having say DNS issues then the VPN connection wouldnt be affected as the VPN link wouldnt be using that service.

It could very well be plusnets dns I have had issues with them in the past so now use alternative DNS servers

could also be PPPOE you can link through to BT pppoe (only temporarily as a fault) and thus you wouldnt get internet but a VPN would.

In reply to a post by pyarwood:

could also be PPPOE you can link through to BT pppoe (only temporarily as a fault) and thus you wouldnt get internet but a VPN would.

A VPN requires Internet access to reach the VPN termination server.