Sipgate Outage

Hi all,
Anyone noticed that Sipgate is down this afternoon, can't make incoming or outgoing calls on all three of my lines.

Someone talked about reliability of SIP services

Tweet

Edited by RR_The_IT_Guy (Wed 22-Jun-22 19:34:11)

I have read on the Plusnet forum ,,,

Sipgate have experienced a major power outage where the servers are located

In reply to a post by Realalemadrid:

I have read on the Plusnet forum ,,,

Sipgate have experienced a major power outage where the servers are located

You would think that they had redundancy
at least like to think.

I mean even a generator or a second datacentre for failover.

I bet they will now be considering what they can do in future.

I mean its better its something like this than a hack.

I tried to read the sipgate status page but its all in german and not being a german speaker its very hard for me to understand even with google translate.

It's quite disappointing that they hadn't planned for a common occurance like this.

It is so common to happen for Sipgate, when did this happen before?

Things happen, it way of world.

Openreach has never lost connection ever. This is more common then Sipgate having power failure.
https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2022/05/openre...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lincolnshire-6...
https://www.basingstokegazette.co.uk/news/20206333.o...

Although the problem was in just one of their data centres it appears there was no redundancy so the power loss took alsmost everything out. Google translate worked pretty well for me. Here's some extracts from the status page

Jun 22, 4:23pm CEST
website
telephony
past events
Unresolved incident: failure of data center Failure of large parts of the telephony.
Jun 22, 4:28pm BST
Identified - The issue has been identified and a fix is ​​being implemented.
Jun 22, 5:29pm BST
Update - Due to a power failure in one of our data centers, telephony is currently only available to our customers to a very limited extent. We are currently examining the exact effects and possible solutions.

And the latest status report

Failure of data center Failure of large parts of the telephony
Monitoring - The data center is online again. We sweep up the last shards. If necessary, please switch mobile devices to flight mode and back once so that they can log in again.
Jun 23, 01:23 AM CEST
Update - Our network components in the previously failed data center are now all powered again.

Mobile telephony, mobile data connections and VoIP telephony are mostly available again.

We seem to be heading to less reliability compared to the old telephone system. EE and Sipgate both failed yesterday, I'm with both and lost all ability to make normal telephone calls. No big deal as had WhatsApp and a choice of conference options online to continue working, but just goes to show even having a back up option isn't always much of a backup. Could the outages have been related, same kit in the same data centre?

Those are different types of failures.

You can mitigate against a data centre power outage by having a back up supply or fail over to another centre. With theft - how can you deal with it? You cannot. Roadworks going through cables - you can tell the contractors where it is, but if they do go through it, there is a problem.

I had intermittent connectivity during that outage yesterday. They haven’t really had any major outages like this in the 10 years I’ve been using them. Some small outages lasting an hour or so perhaps.

A datacentre wide power failure is bad, but almost impossible to mitigate against on a single site basis. Presumably a colo facility.

At least it didn’t burn down.

What annoyed me was that the sipgateukstatus twitter account was thoroughly useless, they posted a tweet saying that the login page was broken about an hour after the lines went down, and have only just added a "oh yeah, SIP was broken, too."

In reply to a post by E300:

We seem to be heading to less reliability compared to the old telephone system?

I wonder if we are paying too little for VoIP services so the providers are not building any resilience. But there was only one pair of wires from your home to the Exchange, and only one Exchange. If the power went off at the Exchange, services failed. Resilient power didn't always work

EE's failure seems to have been with their Voice over 4G, and Voice over WiFi services which both make use of a VoIP platform known as IMS (all the mobile telcos have an IMS). I suspect the BT group will be doing a lot of digging as to why this went wrong - as it also appeared to be regional.

Edited by jchamier (Thu 23-Jun-22 12:07:54)