Voipfone

The Voipfone service has gone down. Anyone know what the problem is?

https://www.voipfonestatus.co.uk/

See 26 August in "historical".

But they don't say what went wrong.

I've been looking at Voipfone as a supplier for when the move to SOGEA takes place and must admit I would like to know what went wrong.

They make a big thing of having two parallel networks for the ultimate in reliability - or at least that's my understanding - so that when either fails, the other takes up the load.

Obviously something somewhere went seriously wrong this time.

Unfortunately even with multiple levels of resilience and redundancy, things can and do go wrong. Cue the recent large scale CDN outages. Starlink with its 1400 odd satellites, the entire system went down globally for an hour or so on Wednesday.

With any single vendor, at some point there is ‘commonality’ in the food chain which may be impossible to avoid.

If you’re needing that level of resilience it’s often better to have a completely separate, independent system (ie mobile phones in this case) or a separate vendor arrangement. The latter not really typical on domestic service but more typical for business.

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

With any single vendor, at some point there is ‘commonality’ in the food chain which may be impossible to avoid.

I agree that if something can go wrong it probably will.

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

If you’re needing that level of resilience it’s often better to have a completely separate, independent system (ie mobile phones in this case) or a separate vendor arrangement. The latter not really typical on domestic service but more typical for business.

I don't need that level of resilience, it was simply curiosity as to what had gone wrong despite Voipfone's obvious care in trying to prevent it. There was obviously some single point of failure somewhere which took the whole thing down, I was simply curious as to what happened.

Doubt we will ever know. Commercial confidentiality and all that.....

I sked Voipfone what caused the outage and got this response:

"I don't have the details regarding the outage but believe it was out of our control and a full incident report will be published as soon as it's completed. "

My gripe was really with Voipfone was that their https://www.voipfonestatus.co.uk/ web page failed to acknowledge there was any problems with their network at all, proudly proclaiming a 100% uptime when clearly this was not the case. A day after the event, all their status page had to say was "Network availability. This incident has been resolved. Aug 26, 16:54 - 20:06 BST" - No apology for inconvenience caused and no detail of what went wrong and even worse was that their status page still claimed for the day in question that uptime was 100%!

I feel subscribers are entitled to know comprehensively when there is a problem with any network, with some kind of indication when the service might be restored and not to be mislead on their status page that everything is OK. Otherwise status pages are quite pointless.

But cheeky that. Status page appears as if it was a roughly three hour outage. How long were they out?

O no not again - Voipfone off line from around 15:30

Attempts to logon to them is greeted with:

Network Error
The request timed out while attempting to communicate with the server. This could be because our server is temporarily unavailable or your internet connection may be having problems.

Bad luck, bad management or a bad actor…

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

Bad luck, bad management or a bad actor…

So looks like it is a bad actor after all...

https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2021/09/ddos-a...