Easynet blames network collapse on dodgy router update
Overnight fix
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Early investigations of a nationwide collapse of the Easynet network have pointed the finger at a software update to a Cisco router.
The outage began at 8.32am on Wednesday, and for some customers lasted most of the working day.
"An Easynet edge router crashed due to a software bug condition triggered by an invalid update from an external source into the Easynet network," a company review of the incident, seen by The Register, says.
The router was located at one of Easynet's London points-of-presence. It was isolated from the network and all traffic re-routed via another London site.
Later, overnight, and under advice from Cisco, engineers made software changes in an attempt to ensure the error cannot occur again. For Easynet and the thousands of businesses affected, the real recriminations are now beginning, however.
In a statement yesterday, the provider anticipated "full service will be restored to them well within our normal [service level agreements]". Yet subscribers to its "business grade" Surestream ADSL product were offline until after 3pm.
Easyney sells its SureStream ADSL product as an alternative to a leased line, with a 99.9 per cent uptime guarantee (quarterly). That guarantee wa easily broken for yesterday, with some customers suffering more than 6 hours downtime. ®
COMMENTS
An edge router
A single edge router took down an ISP. Nice redundancy / monitoring / replacement policies there. I thought the point of buying very expensive Cisco hardware was that this sort of thing wouldn't affect the connectivity as a whole, rather than having to have some Cisco guy read commands to you over the phone when things go wrong?
You're assuming......
People read the article BEFORE they jumped in to comment that it was really bad that a single router could take down a substantial amount of an ISP's network and then go on to debate the 99.9 uptime guarantee figures :-)
Guess what ?
On checking this morning at my place of work, we still don't have a link to the outside world - I really hope the new router which is on it's way works......
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