CenturyLink's Nationwide Outage Affects Millions

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.

Comments

Once upon a qwest

[Reverand Dave]

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.

Re:Once upon a qwest

[sl3xd]

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.

Re:Once upon a qwest

[Hatta]

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.

Re:Once upon a qwest

[michaelmalak]

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

Actually, 1997, during the Clinton administration.

Re:nobody posted yet...

[Cenan]

Apparently a wide one.

No estimates

[Rich0]

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!

They promised the same rate f or 5 years ...

[johnlcallaway]

.. they didn't promise the same access!

Its not the whole united states .

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

My service near STL is up.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Glad I switched to Comcast last year

[Anonymous Coward]

"Glad I switched to Comcast last year"

Those aren't words heard very often...

Re:nobody posted yet...

[Penguinisto]

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.