BT Internet Outage Was Our Fault, Says Equinix (theregister.co.uk)

Kat Hall, reporting for The Register: Telecity's owner, Equinix, has 'fessed up to a "brief outage" which subsequently knocked 10 per cent of BT internet users offline this morning as well as a number of other providers. A spokesman from the group, which slurped up Telecity for 2.3bn euro last year, confirmed that the outage occurred at its LD8 site in the Docklands. The company has nine London sites which service more than 600 businesses.The outage occurred due to power failure, which lasted for around 75 minutes. ( Update: Some readers note that the outage lasted for as long as three hours. ) BT wasn't the only ISP that suffered an outage earlier this morning. All services have been restored, according to Ars Technica. Update: 07/20 14:57 GMT: It was apparently a faulty UPS that caused the outage.

Comments

Re:So

[fustakrakich]

Well, for one thing it shows how easy it is to pull the plug on a lot of people at once. A single service like this shouldn't have this kind of power. It illustrates the necessity of having alternate hookups that can *route around the damage*

This is why you need redundancy and backups.

[Ash-Fox]

This is why I have redundancy and backups. This morning I had connectivity issues on my 100Mbps BT line, so I switched to my 200Mbps Virgin Media line and all was well.

It does surprise me how many people that depend largely on the Internet for work don't get a second Internet connection (and do so on separate infrastructure) and then complain when they have down time and how some how they couldn't get 100% uptime all year.

Re:This is why you need redundancy and backups.

[AmiMoJo]

Virgin does offer "200Mb" in some areas. I was on it earlier this year, but was getting around 1.5Mb for most of the day so gave up trying to get them to fix it.

BT's "fibre" offering isn't really fibre, but it goes up to 80Mb over your copper phone line. They also offer even faster real fibre in a very few areas, and charge silly money for it. One of the reasons that the government is saying they aren't investing enough is their failure to roll fibre out to most of the UK, preferring to milk their crappy old copper network for as long as possible.

Re: This is why you need redundancy and backups.

[Ash-Fox]

If I'm lying, how did I fabricate my speed test?

http://www.speedtest.net/my-re...

Re:This is why you need redundancy and backups.

[AmiMoJo]

I wish they would stop pissing around with DSL and just lay in some fibre. Other countries started doing it years ago... In fact my ex in Japan had a symmetric 100/100 fibre connection back in 2005, eleven years ago, for less than I pay to get 50/15 VDSL now.

The government had a large fund for upgrading our broadband infrastructure, but BT pissed it away on upgrading its copper network. NEC offered to install fibre to the home everywhere, but because the government was chummy with BT's management they didn't get it.

Faulty UPS?

[Not-a-Neg]

Reminds me of a company I know that built a brand new data center, put in an over-sized UPS system, over-sized electric generator, state of the art power monitoring/transfer system, and tested the generator bi-annually. Only there were three problems when the area finally suffered a blackout:

1.) They never tested fail-over to the UPS, they had only tested starting up the generator and then manually switched off mainline power once the generator was fully operational to see if it worked.

2.) The UPS installer never bothered to connect the batteries to the power control unit so when power did fail everything immediately lost power (these were racks of large batteries wired together, not the plug-and-play consumer stuff.) When the generator kicked in, everything tried to turn back on at the same time and tripped the breaker. LOL.

3.) The air conditioner was not connected to the fancy power transfer system and after a little over an hour, servers started throttling and eventually shut down from the heat. This all happened in early August on one of the hottest days of that year.