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CenturyLink's Nationwide Outage Affects Millions

Posted by timothy on from the experiencing-seems-a-gentle-verb dept.

halfEvilTech writes "CenturyLink, the nation's third largest telco network, is experiencing an outage of its broadband service nationwide, leaving its support systems overwhelmed and even causing its website to hit a few snags this morning. The company, which at last count has 5.8 million broadband subscribers, has no estimates yet on how long it will take to restore service." CenturyLink is the company that will be providing the Defense Department with the equivalent of Internet2.

105 comments

  1. nobody posted yet... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Are the majority of /. readers using Centurylink?

    1. Re:nobody posted yet... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I would troll here, but its a slow news day ( been like that for years now on /. ) but my trolling would be somewhat un-original. I'm waiting for the young'ins to do it.

    2. Re:nobody posted yet... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      i dont know, they live in some 'nation' says thimothy our beloved sysop

    3. Re:nobody posted yet... by centipedes.in.my.vag · · Score: 0

      There are not enough details to comment on how it happened, or why, and the people that it's affecting are unable to read or comment easily, for obvious reasons. There's just not much to be said at this point; what insightful comments can one expect at this point?

      --
      Only on /. can I lose karma with 2x "5, Funny" posts.
    4. Re:nobody posted yet... by Cenan · · Score: 2

      Apparently a wide one.

      --
      ... whatever ...
    5. Re:nobody posted yet... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "...the people that it's affecting are unable to read or comment easily"

      Actually, the outage ended about 15 minutes before this story hit slashdot; at least in Las Vegas.

    6. Re:nobody posted yet... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      FierceTelecom - "CenturyLink suffers Internet outage in 21 states"

      This issue started at 4AM 5/7/2013 and lasted until just a few moments ago, at least in the Tallahassee/North Florida region. The outage took out a good bit of their national network, not just the local region.

      Article - http://www.fiercetelecom.com/story/centurylink-wades-through-nationwide-internet-outage-customers-21-states-af/2013-05-07

      Video - http://cdn.l2net.com/content/video/CTLFL-Outage-BGP-05072013.mp4

    7. Re:nobody posted yet... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Anonymous Coward, Anonymous Coward, Anonymous Coward, Anonymous Coward... damn, am I the only one here?

    8. Re:nobody posted yet... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      21 states, that's over half the US!

    9. Re:nobody posted yet... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Land wise, yes, depending on what states were effected.

    10. Re:nobody posted yet... by Penguinisto · · Score: 2

      Are the majority of /. readers using Centurylink?

      I used to (had no choice at a previous place I was renting out on the Oregon Coast) - service was crap but usable. However, it was their billing department who turned a 'first two months free!' promotion into a 'I'm sorry sir, but you owe us $126 before we can re-instate your service', in spite of never missing a payment. The nanosecond Charter showed up in the neighborhood a month later, I switched so fast that I could have almost not dropped a packet.

      All I can say is - never again. Compare Centurylink's $70/mo for 3.5 Mb/sec and maybe 70-75% uptime, with Charter's $30/mo 30 Mb/sec and 99.999% uptime.

      Fuck Centurylink.

      --
      Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
    11. Re:nobody posted yet... by ttucker · · Score: 1

      Are the majority of /. readers using Centurylink?

      I used to (had no choice at a previous place I was renting out on the Oregon Coast) - service was crap but usable. However, it was their billing department who turned a 'first two months free!' promotion into a 'I'm sorry sir, but you owe us $126 before we can re-instate your service', in spite of never missing a payment. The nanosecond Charter showed up in the neighborhood a month later, I switched so fast that I could have almost not dropped a packet.

      All I can say is - never again. Compare Centurylink's $70/mo for 3.5 Mb/sec and maybe 70-75% uptime, with Charter's $30/mo 30 Mb/sec and 99.999% uptime.

      Fuck Centurylink.

      We went Cox Business and never looked back!

    12. Re:nobody posted yet... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Cox sucker!

    13. Re:nobody posted yet... by RanchNachos · · Score: 1

      $30/month for charter is the promo price. expect it to at least double.

    14. Re:nobody posted yet... by Ol+Olsoc · · Score: 1

      "...the people that it's affecting are unable to read or comment easily"

      Actually, the outage ended about 15 minutes before this story hit slashdot; at least in Las Vegas.

      Whne is the internet going to move to the cloud? Then these problems will go away.

      --
      The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
    15. Re:nobody posted yet... by x_t0ken_407 · · Score: 1

      zomg if I had mod points...

    16. Re:nobody posted yet... by ixidor · · Score: 1

      and evan after id doubles it is still cheaper than CenturyLink 6065

    17. Re:nobody posted yet... by Penguinisto · · Score: 1

      Don't care - $60/mo for 30mb versus $70/mo for 3.(something)mb that breaks down all the time (and being billed as if it were a 6mb package)? No effing way.

      --
      Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
  2. Once upon a qwest by Reverand+Dave · · Score: 4, Insightful

    After CenturyLink "partnered" with Qwest they pretty much became a pariah in my book. Qwest was just a terrible terrible mess and apparently CenturyLink is keeping their spirit alive.

    --
    I got here through a series of tubes
    1. Re:Once upon a qwest by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I had the impression that Century Link bought Qwest and threw out the much of the old management. Anecdotally, I knew somebody who worked there at the time and she said things were improving noticeably inside the company after Century Link took over.

    2. Re:Once upon a qwest by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      NO management was lost at our location, and frankly there needs to be some that are cut. I don't see ANY noticeable improvement in ANYTHING under the new company.

    3. Re:Once upon a qwest by sl3xd · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It's Qwest's famouse Spirit of Service

      For CenturyLink, it was probably a good deal: They get to be a Tier-1 peer, instead of having to pay extortion fees like TIER-2 and 3.

      It was a very good deal for Qwest's customers. They went from being limited to 1.5 Mbit to being able to buy "up to" 40 Mbit...

      I dumped CenturyLink/Qwest long before then, but my brother supposedly got close to 30 Mbit measured.

      Like most telecom idiots, CenturyLink has a 12-month "introductory rate", and they won't negotiate. Since all of their competitors do the same, the practice has become switching networks every year, after the introductory rate expires. The same applies if you have Cable or Satellite TV; customers just switch every year for a lower rate.

      I really don't see how being so boneheaded helps either company, but that's telecom in the USA.

      --
      -- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
    4. Re:Once upon a qwest by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Ah, too bad then. I knew Qwest was just terrible, but had believed it had been improving under Century Link. Sorry to hear that's not the case.

    5. Re:Once upon a qwest by Hatta · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Qwest was the only telco to refuse warrantless wiretaps during the Bush era. I was happily a Qwest customer until they got bought out by CenturyLink. I would switch immediately to any telco that guaranteed refusal of any unwarranted requests. Unfortunately, none exist.

      --
      Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
    6. Re:Once upon a qwest by Nyder · · Score: 1

      It's Qwest's famouse Spirit of Service

      For CenturyLink, it was probably a good deal: They get to be a Tier-1 peer, instead of having to pay extortion fees like TIER-2 and 3.

      It was a very good deal for Qwest's customers. They went from being limited to 1.5 Mbit to being able to buy "up to" 40 Mbit...

      I dumped CenturyLink/Qwest long before then, but my brother supposedly got close to 30 Mbit measured.

      Like most telecom idiots, CenturyLink has a 12-month "introductory rate", and they won't negotiate. Since all of their competitors do the same, the practice has become switching networks every year, after the introductory rate expires. The same applies if you have Cable or Satellite TV; customers just switch every year for a lower rate.

      I really don't see how being so boneheaded helps either company, but that's telecom in the USA.

      I had Qwest, then Centurylink took over and they kicked me off the service because I "download" too much.

      I was pissed, but in hindsight, i got the better of the deal.

      --
      Be seeing you...
    7. Re:Once upon a qwest by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yes, it wasn't a partnering, it was a buyout.

      There have been many terminations, and a lot of turnover since - now I'm not certain of any internal improvement.

      I do know at the time of the merge things were a mess so I guess improvement is expected (if you can't go down anymore you may bounce up).

      Having dealt with both of the companies prior to the merger I'd say Qwest was actually a bit better to work with than CenturyLink (CenturyTel wasn't too bad, but fell hard on the Embarq merger that begot CenturyLink).

    8. Re:Once upon a qwest by thomasw_lrd · · Score: 1

      CenturyLink jacked my rates up, but I called them, they gave me a new deal. What's surprising about it is, in my BFE town, they are the only game in town, unless I pay over $100 a month for cable plus internet from Suddenlink.

      --
      21st Century Renaissance Man
    9. Re:Once upon a qwest by rot26 · · Score: 0

      You're just bitter because you're stuck astroturfing for uncle sugar after wasting two years at corey. Hey at least you can get that jixxer with your allotment. guffaw.

      --



      To ensure perfect aim, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target
    10. Re:Once upon a qwest by ahoffer0 · · Score: 1

      I saved a bundle switching from Comcast to Century Link. I get 8 Mbps/down which is fine for my Netflix and other streaming needs. If the price goes up, I'll just switch back to Comcast on one of their introductory plans. Then again, in a year from now, it is likely that HSPA+ and LTE wireless broadband will be competitive with Comcast and Century link in terms of price for my personal bandwidth needs.

      It's a good time to be a customer.

      PS: I'm lucky. My Century Link connection is still up.

    11. Re:Once upon a qwest by bbcisdabomb · · Score: 1

      People tend to switch every 2 years, as that's when the contracts expire. Other than that, you're totally right.

      --
      Please put some pants on before you post again.
    12. Re:Once upon a qwest by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What do you expect from a company that is overpriced, outdated, and just plain assholes to work with. What other company do you know wastes money driving flatbed 1 ton trucks around with a billboard on them, "WooHoo get Centurylink!" They called me in 1998(qwest), they were rude to me, so I said, "Tell you what, disconnect my service right now." I've never looked back.

    13. Re:Once upon a qwest by Jawnn · · Score: 1

      Our data networking and VOIP service were spotless while QWest was running the show. After the move to CenturyLink customer service (which, to be fair, was never great) because a joke. I do not exaggerate, it took weeks to have simple issues resolved. Stability and reliability of their network has, clearly, also suffered, but it's the useless customer service that has us moving all of our traffic to a new carrier soon. Today's mess is just an underscore.

    14. Re:Once upon a qwest by Sperbels · · Score: 1

      Well, I've been nothing but happy with Qwest/Century Link. Have very fast DSL through them. My experience with Comcast has been: promised speeds that were never achieved (although, still generally faster than DSL), frequent service distruptions, and I feel like I'm talking to a car salesman whenever I talk to them. I recently had to go back to Comcast after moving. It took me 10 seconds to tell them exactly what I wanted, then it took another 10 minutes to tell them I didn't want all the extra stuff the kept trying to push on me. I'm not happy about being back with Comcast.

    15. Re:Once upon a qwest by hurfy · · Score: 1

      Can't tell the diference here....

      Outage didn't affect us...as far as i know...
      We were down due to local problems at the same time but the line next door worked.....until they fixed this line then the other went down...sigh. Somehow fixing and rebooting my line down the street killed the modem for next door...whatever.

      Generally been fine up until this year when they alternate breaking the dialtone and internet (never both,wtf) each month. 5 service calls this year between 2 accounts...not impressed.

    16. Re:Once upon a qwest by michaelmalak · · Score: 2

      Qwest was the only telco to refuse warrantless wiretaps during the Bush era.

      Actually, 1997, during the Clinton administration.

    17. Re:Once upon a qwest by Obfuscant · · Score: 1

      As an anecdote on the other side of the coin, Qwest installed my DSL on the wrong (second) phone line, and lied to me about getting a static IP to get me to sign up. They then lied to the PUC when I complained, saying they never told me any of that.

    18. Re:Once upon a qwest by Forever+Wondering · · Score: 1

      What about sonic.net? They may not be what you want, but they seem to come close:
      http://boingboing.net/2012/06/25/sonic-net-stopped-saving-logs.html

      --
      Like a good neighbor, fsck is there ...
    19. Re:Once upon a qwest by sl3xd · · Score: 1

      I suppose it depends on the area; the contract lengths for home Internet service are actually zero in my area - from both Comcast, and CenturyLink. The introductory rates are still good for 6 months to a year.

      State & local regulations, maybe?

      --
      -- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
    20. Re:Once upon a qwest by Reverand+Dave · · Score: 1

      When you have one master that punches and kicks you, then you get a master that just punches you, they do seem like a much more benevolent master despite the fact that they are both mistreating you, it's just a matter of degree.

      --
      I got here through a series of tubes
    21. Re:Once upon a qwest by airdweller · · Score: 1

      Same experience here. Comcast -> CL. 12Mbs. $30/m. No complaints so far.

    22. Re:Once upon a qwest by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Same boat here. Switched from comcast 18mb service to CenturyLink 20mb guaranteed and it has been rock solid though i can't say I had many complaints about comast either. Saved about $15 a month over comcast ($75 down to $60) for faster service. Rate is month to month, no contract. I will say though it was a bait and switch, I was told 40mb and 5 up was available in my area and it wasn't until rubber hit the road that I found out only 20mb in my service area. I'm told my neighborhood in seattle will get gigafiber this fall so I'm just waiting patiently.

  3. Century Link by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I am on Century-link and haven't even had a hiccup in my connection.

    1. Re:Century Link by AmongTheBoulders · · Score: 1

      My 1.5 Mb Century-link DSL connection is also still working normally. I have not noticed any problems now or from earlier this morning.

    2. Re:Century Link by Zibodiz · · Score: 1

      Same here. I had trouble accessing 1 website yesterday (pretty unlikely to be related), but I've had no trouble at all since. I am, however, on part of the original CenturyTel network, not on the Qwest wires. I'm guessing it's probably just one of their sub-companies that was affected.

    3. Re:Century Link by sycodon · · Score: 1

      Seems to be fucking up a lot of news sites. They apparently host Ad servers.

      --
      When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
  4. Where is the status page? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I cannot find any notice of outage on their website.

  5. Not me by Tailhook · · Score: 1

    My DSL is up. It's either fixed or didn't involve my part of the system.

    CenturyLink (formerly Qwest in my case) has been very reliable during the past year. You get the rate you pay for as well.

    --
    Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
    1. Re:Not me by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Denver has been up all morning (if you know what I mean).

    2. Re:Not me by tilante · · Score: 1

      Mine was down this morning, but I can ping my home box and SSH to it now from work. Looks like it's fixed in my area (Tallahassee, Florida). My past experience is that CenturyLink is reliable - at least, more so than Comcast, which is my only other broadband option that doesn't involve satellite or the like.

    3. Re:Not me by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's fine for me here as well. Haven't noticed any problems today. Northern Utah.

    4. Re:Not me by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      CenturyLink direct customers were the only ones affected here. Using an independent ISP here even though they use CenturyLink's lines none of my services were impacted.

      So it was either a routing issue or without more information possibly a DNS issue.

      A couple months ago they had a regional DSL outage that took ~24 hours to repair. It was apparently caused by a software upgrade, once again the independent ISPs here were unaffected.

    5. Re:Not me by jerk · · Score: 1

      Same here. I was streaming video last night as I went to bed and have been logged on to my VPN from work all morning. If it went down, it was between 11:30pm and 8am MST.

    6. Re:Not me by tipo159 · · Score: 1

      Mine is up as well. No sign that there was a problem today.

  6. CenturyLink = Crap by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Enough said.

  7. This is what happens... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    This is what happens when you don't maintain your infrastructure. This is the company which is still advertising 1.5mbps DSL has "lightning fast" in many areas. It's obvious that once they took over Qwest they continued their "hands-off" approach to maintenance and upgrades. Sad, but not surprising.

  8. MO by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    South-Western MO went back up around 11:30 Central time.

  9. century link down by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Maybe century link can just ask china let them have their network back.

  10. No estimates by Rich0 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Having dealt with having to provide estimates on service restoration at work, my experience is that by the time you can figure out what it would take to restore service, it won't be long before service is actually restored.

    I'm not saying that providing status updates isn't good practice. However, it is usually rare that you'll get an ETA on something being fixed. Maybe if they discover it is a broken line and they actually have to dig it up and fix it and that will take hours you might get an ETA. Usually root cause analysis is 95% of the work in problem solving.

    Reminds me of a story at work when some developers decided to actually try to embrace the outsourcing model that was being pushed by management. They sent a list of bugs to the outsourced development team and asked for estimates to fix them. They replied, "no problem, just tell us which lines of code to modify and how and we'll take care of it." Now, THAT is a value-add!

    1. Re:No estimates by geminidomino · · Score: 1

      Odd. When I called the support line (which I always do in the case of an outage, to see if the recording tells me it's a known issue) at around 9AM Eastern, the Estimate restoration was 7PM. Obviously, they beat that by several hours.

      Maybe it's a regional thing, but I usually get estimates, even if they do go a little heavy on the Scotty coefficient.

    2. Re:No estimates by Rich0 · · Score: 1

      Well, they can always make something up to keep you from calling back.

      A manager in our operations support group once explained the situation to some internal customers - if the system is down, do you want everybody available to be fixing the problem, or do you want them to spend their time telling people that it is under control? (Mind you, this was only for internal customers.) The ultimate decision was that for very short outages they'd just deal with it, and once it was taking more than 15min they'd start issuing communications. For a short outage few would even notice it in the first place or bother to call it in, and announcing it after the fact didn't really provide any value-add.

      Now, if we were contracting with an outside company we'd insist on knowing about all outages as part of our SLA - we'd care about them after the fact because we'd want to know if we're getting value for our money. Where internal customers are concerned the data would get reported to management, and they'd decide if the support group was doing a good job. The random company workers really didn't have decision rights over where the work was done - it isn't like we let individual departments contract for their own support.

  11. They promised the same rate f or 5 years ... by johnlcallaway · · Score: 2

    .. they didn't promise the same access!

    --
    I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
    1. Re:They promised the same rate f or 5 years ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I think this post say it for me.

  12. Question by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    What nation?

  13. "CenturyLink, the nation's third largest telco" by PolygamousRanchKid+ · · Score: 1

    My DSL is up. It's either fixed or didn't involve my part of the system.

    My DSL is up. It's either fixed or didn't involve my nation of the system.

    --
    Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
    1. Re:"CenturyLink, the nation's third largest telco" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Many of the affected customers started coming back on about an hour ago, but from what I was relayed via a CenturyLink rep was 15 states impacted out of the 33 states they cover.

    2. Re:"CenturyLink, the nation's third largest telco" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So this is another one of those complaints from people who don't like the fact that Slashdot's an American site?

  14. Its not the whole united states . by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    Western states in the former Qwest footprint seem to be up and running ok. East Coast Legacy Centurylink seems to be not having a good time of it though.

    Suffice it to say, the sky is not falling and Centurylink is not pulling a "u-verse" on it.

    1. Re:Its not the whole united states . by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Point of data:

      Mt connection in Seattle near first hill is working this morning.

    2. Re:Its not the whole united states . by 0racle · · Score: 1

      My east coast former Embarq DSL has been working all day.

      --
      "I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
  15. DNS? by neghvar1 · · Score: 1

    I don’t know exactly what is causing the problem, but when I used to be on Time Warner, we once went down for 4 days due to a DNS issue. I just modified the router settings to go to Google’s DNS servers and my problem was solved.

    1. Re:DNS? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Given all the stories of ISP DNS malfeasance I'm surprised that the first thing people do upon getting a new internet connection isn't manually set their DNS addresses.

    2. Re:DNS? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Not a DNS issue at least not in simple terms. The first thing I tried this AM was redirecting to googles DNS.

    3. Re:DNS? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yeah no, this was much worse. They completely dicked up their BGP tables. Doesn't matter what basic troubleshooting DNS magic you think you have. No packets will go anywhere once that happens. It's massively impressive they would allow such a sweeping change go through without more testing.

    4. Re: DNS? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Intriguing! Can you recommend a source of guidance for this? Not a total trog here, just unfamiliar with this option.

    5. Re:DNS? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm surprised by this as well. I met a really hot chick at a bar the other night and I went home with her. She let me take her home. Incredible, right? Well, hear this:

      She removed her clothes as soon as we entered her apartment, but I needed to reboot my servers at 9:30 that night. I got her wifi information (unsecured, what an idiot). The SSID was obvious (sexy_hot_slut_wifi). Then I mistyped the RWW address, because my iFaggot pad keyboard sucks.

      Low and fucking behold - I got redirected to a DNS landing page. WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH THIS BITCH?

      I asked myself the same question you just did. Why do people NOT manually set their DNS addresses as the first thing upon getting a new internet connection?

      Needless to say, we did not engage in coitus that night.

    6. Re: DNS? by RussR42 · · Score: 1

      Here.

    7. Re:DNS? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I wasted nearly 45 minutes this morning trying to troubleshoot a client's connection before I heard about this. First thing I did after seeing some of their DNS requests time out was have them set up google's dns servers. Fixed the dns issues, but then the connections timed out. Finally had them run a tracert and discovered that their outgoing connection went from centurylink to qwest then timed out.

      Told them to call their ISPs support and complain.

  16. "nation's third largest telco" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    WHICH NATION'S? Not everyone lives in your country.

    1. Re:"nation's third largest telco" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It says "the nation's". On the rare occasion that Americans discuss any other country, we'll refer to them as "a nation", "them", or just "for-ners".

  17. Glad I switched to Comcast last year by rwyoder · · Score: 1

    I had CL DSL for over 10 years.
    I'm only 2600' from the CO, but the best they would sell me was 7mbs.
    So I switched to Comcast and get 22mbs, *and* native IPv6, for less than I was paying CL.

    1. Re:Glad I switched to Comcast last year by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      "Glad I switched to Comcast last year"

      Those aren't words heard very often...

    2. Re:Glad I switched to Comcast last year by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm switching FROM Comcast to CenturyLink - if they can provide consistent service.

      Just got my CL modem yesterday, hooked it up and it worked for about 10 minutes, then went dead. I called them up and got the same shitty service that Comcast usually provides (i.e. someone with a thick accent that can't understand me very well and I can't understand them very well). After a bit of back and forth though it seems to be working fine.

      I'll see how it goes - Comcast was very inconsistent for me - speeds varied from less than 1 Mbps to 55 Mbps. They just couldn't seem to work consistently.

      I've only been on CL for a few hours - I only am paying for 12 Mbps - I'm not quite getting that much, but it's close enough (over 11 by most speed test sites). I can watch Netflix okay - most of what I do doesn't require that much more bandwidth. (I'm not a gamer or frequent torrenter of movies/music)

      CL really pisses me off because all their commercials SCREAM $19.95 a month and yet that's just not reality. After the intro-promotional is over with I'll be paying $55 a month for 12 Mbps (paying $36 a month now) and of course that doesn't count the initial installation fees even though I installed it myself.

      Of course if 12 Mbps turns out not to be enough, I'll have to shell out more. Comcast was over $70 a month, but like I said they couldn't deliver consistently.

      I really hate both Comcast and CenturyLink, but they're the only options available here. I keep thinking of Lily Tomlin as the phone operator "We don't have to care, we're the phone company!"

  18. My service near STL is up. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    I didn't notice any downtime.

    Centurylink keeps raising their prices and lowering their bandwidth. I started out at 25 mbit fiber to the house. Then it went to 20, then 15, finally 10.

    Prices went up in the meantime so I downgraded to 3 mbit. However they implement the cap seems to work worse than I'd expect. They also require a 1 year contract to get the "discount" rates and it has a $200 cancellation fee even though I don't lease a router and I've been a customer for 5 years.

    Overall the local office has top notch support people that are real humans. The national office... not so much.

  19. OMG! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I'm a Century Link customer! My broadband is down?!

  20. "The equivalent of Internet2"? by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 0

    Sounds like it might be more like Internet0.

    --
    #DeleteChrome
  21. Glitch by rot26 · · Score: 1

    That always happens when they turn up the pipe to Bluffdale.

    --



    To ensure perfect aim, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target
  22. Perfect by ThatsNotPudding · · Score: 1

    CenturyLink is the company that will be providing the Defense Department with the equivalent of Internet2.

    Sleep Tight!

    1. Re:Perfect by Keruo · · Score: 1

      Maybe they were trying to implement security by air-gap and unplugged the wrong cord, accidentally achieving it.
      Security by accident - now there's new sales pitch for their sales team to use.

      --
      There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
  23. Trolling on Slashdot -- by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    -- you're doing it wrong.

  24. Current Centurylink Sub by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    This is the second time Centurylink has had a major outage... This time it appears NC is not included. While my service reliability with Centurylink in the past has degraded over the last three months it has been almost flawless.

    My question is did they just grow to fast taken over to many differing networks and lose reliable control at some key point?

  25. Ah, Centurylink by holmedog · · Score: 1

    I've used them for years and years (only broadband in my area). In general it's been a good service, but when they screw the pooch they go above and beyond. I'll never forgive them for leaving me with huge latency for 3 months. If I ever have a choice in broadband they will be gone.

    http://ask.slashdot.org/story/12/03/06/175223/ask-slashdot-what-is-an-acceptable-broadband-latency

  26. bloody mary bloody mary bloody *mmphhhh* by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You know who else didn't have DNS problems?

  27. What outage? by rootmon · · Score: 1

    I have been working since 8 AM Eastern Time as a telecommuter and my CenturyLink DSL has been up without so much as an SSH session disconnecting all day. I live in SW Florida and my colleagues tell me they're having problems but perhaps the outage is not as widespread as publicized or it's affecting DNS and I use OpenDNS instead of my ISP's DNS for filtering sites I don't want my kids to browse such as adult content.

    In my experience, Cable modems were far less stable than DSL. I had Comcast for a while and it was much worse. So please don't listen to the cable modem trolls. Overall DSL is a more reliable technology and I've been using Spring/Embarq/CenturyLink for 12 years now with very few hiccups which they did address quickly, except for a move where I used DirectWay/Hughes and then Comcast for a while. DirectWay/Hughes was good if you have no other options but satellite just has too much latency for some apps like voip or skype, and Comcast was terrible especially during peak hours.

    --
    "As flies to the wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for sport." - William Shakespeare, King Lear
    1. Re:What outage? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No outage for me either. I'm using Google's DNS servers.

  28. Nationwide? by tyrione · · Score: 1

    Wow. Then I wonder what service I'm using if not CLink in the PNW? I'm not experiencing the outages so I guess `nationwide' is a bit over-the-top.

    1. Re:Nationwide? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Same here in the mountain west. Working right now, and logs show no outages over the last 10 hours.

    2. Re:Nationwide? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Didn't you know? out in the 'wild new lands' of the west coast, we aren't considered part of the 'nation'. we are frontier folk.

  29. clueless by no-body · · Score: 1

    I am complainimng to Centurylink for about a week about their service overwhelmed. Latency times of 700+ ms right out my door - countless emails with traceroute logs bring no change - clueless customeer support. With Qwest nthing like that happpened!!!

  30. So ... Re-using AOL Disks Again? by hduff · · Score: 1

    That caused the Three-Mile Island disaster. They should have learned their lesson.

    --
    "I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
  31. All this yappity yap about 5 9's of reliability. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The author of the story "Stacey Higginbotham" - Apparently Chicken Little now has aliases.

    I was in an area where the service outage was readily observable. Was back up shortly after noon.

    No days on end without service. Tech support was a bit laggy.

    I subscribe to Centurylink's updates on facebook. I saw it on my phone this morning that they were addressing issues, and promptly updated us when it was time to reboot our modems to get online.

    The reference to CenturyLink providing "internet2" connectivity to the government is quaint. If I recall correctly, centurylink bought qwest, and qwest had a bunch of smaller fiber purchases before they were qwest. Perhaps they were just the best choice to put it together because they already had the fiber?

    Ah, right, we're slashdot, where its easier to whine with the rest of the folks rather than think for ourselves.

  32. DSL isn't even available in my suburban area by zummit · · Score: 1

    I can't even get Qworst ... I mean Century Link DSL at my home office in a major suburb of Denver not 5 miles from downtown! WTF???

  33. Centurylink 12hr outage occurred May 3, NOT May 7 by hardwarefreak · · Score: 1

    The media reporting of this outage as occurring on May 7 is flat wrong. They're off by 4 days. Centurylink's network outage began at ~12:25 CST May 3 and ended at ~01:00 CST May 4. Following are the entries from my mail server log that show the start, end, and duration of the outage. Note the flurry of queued deliveries occurring after IP routing was restored at 01:02 May 4. You can clearly see there are no client connections between 12:20 CST May 3 and 01:02 CST May 4, about 12.5 hours. I called the DSL support line once at about 13:30 May 3 after performing local troubleshooting and eliminating local equipment as the cause. I received "all circuits are busy, please try again later." Receiving that message when calling a telco is like walking into a grocery store and finding the shelves empty. I instantly realized the severity of the outage, and gave myself the afternoon of May 3 off, knowing it wouldn't be fixed for many hours.

    BTW, how does one go about modifying the headline? It needs to inform readers that the outage date/time in the referenced articles is wrong by 3 days.

    May 3 12:15:04 greer postfix/smtpd[24985]: connect from unknown[199.15.233.160]
    May 3 12:15:04 greer postfix/smtpd[24985]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from unknown[199.15.233.160]: 450 4.7.1 Client host rejected: cannot find your reverse hostname, [199.15.233.160]; from= to= proto=ESMTP helo=
    May 3 12:15:04 greer postfix/smtpd[24985]: disconnect from unknown[199.15.233.160]
    May 3 12:17:01 greer postfix/anvil[24898]: statistics: max connection rate 2/60s for (smtp:59.55.253.97) at May 3 12:09:06
    May 3 12:17:01 greer postfix/anvil[24898]: statistics: max connection count 1 for (smtp:168.100.1.7) at May 3 12:08:13
    May 3 12:17:01 greer postfix/anvil[24898]: statistics: max cache size 2 at May 3 12:08:41
    May 3 12:17:52 greer postfix/smtpd[25008]: connect from rheocrat.us-deals-atlanta.com[91.90.205.207]
    May 3 12:17:52 greer postfix/smtpd[25008]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from rheocrat.us-deals-atlanta.com[91.90.205.207]: 554 5.7.1 : Client host rejected: Mail not accepted from Ukraine; from= to= proto=ESMTP helo=
    May 3 12:18:09 greer postfix/smtpd[25008]: disconnect from rheocrat.us-deals-atlanta.com[91.90.205.207]
    May 3 12:20:30 greer postfix/smtpd[25013]: connect from unknown[173.232.112.158]
    May 3 12:20:31 greer postfix/smtpd[25013]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from unknown[173.232.112.158]: 450 4.7.1 Client host rejected: cannot find your reverse hostname, [173.232.112.158]; from= to= proto=ESMTP helo=
    May 3 12:20:31 greer postfix/smtpd[25013]: disconnect from unknown[173.232.112.158]
    May 3 12:23:51 greer postfix/anvil[24898]: statistics: max connection rate 1/60s for (smtp:91.90.205.207) at May 3 12:17:52
    May 3 12:23:51 greer postfix/anvil[24898]: statistics: max connection count 1 for (smtp:91.90.205.207) at May 3 12:17:52
    May 3 12:23:51 greer postfix/anvil[24898]: statistics: max cache size 1 at May 3 12:17:52
    May 4 01:02:00 greer postfix/smtpd[26610]: connect from mail88.us2.rsgsv.net[72.26.195.88]
    May 4 01:02:00 greer postfix/smtpd[26610]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from mail88.us2.rsgsv.net[72.26.195.88]: 554 5.7.1 : Client host rejected: Access denied; from= to= proto=ESMTP helo=
    May 4 01:02:00 greer postfix/smtpd[26610]: disconnect from mail88.us2.rsgsv.net[72.26.195.88]
    May 4 01:02:26 greer postfix/smtpd[26614]: connect from oss.sgi.com[192.48.182.195]
    May 4 01:02:26 greer postfix/smtpd[26610]: connect from oss.sgi.com[192.48.182.195]
    May 4 01:02:26 greer postfix/smtpd[26614]: F174E6C1B3: client=oss.sgi.com[192.48.182.195]
    May 4 01:02:27 greer postfix/cleanup[26615]: F174E6C1B3: message-id=
    May 4 01:02:27 greer postfix/qmgr[15493]: F174E6C1B3: from=, size=6358, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
    May 4 01:02:27 greer postfix/smtpd[26614]: disconnect from oss.sgi.com[192.48.182.195]
    May 4 01:02:27 greer postfix/smtpd[26610]: 172866C1B8: client=oss.sgi.com[192.48.182.195]
    May 4 01:02:27 greer spamd[23679]: spamd: connection from localhost [127.0