BT broadband goes TITSUP - cripples Scots, Geordies, Northern Irish
A man walks into a bar complaining about his multiple nodes
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Some of the telcos which depend on BT's network to offer broadband services to their customers have been reporting a major outage affecting thousands of people in the North of England, Northern Ireland and the two biggest cities in Scotland.
ISP Zen Internet told its subscribers that BT's 20CN and 21CN circuits were currently hampered by an unknown problem "across multiple nodes".
The areas said to be affected by the outage are Edinburgh, Preston, Glasgow South, Newcastle Upon Tyne and parts of Northern Ireland.
In the past half an hour, AAISP told its customers that BT engineers were working on a fix. It added:
The affected router has had stopped process restarted and the controlled recovery of the device is being closely monitored. Service should be available within the next 30 minutes. The geographical area of impact is across Scotland, the North of England and Northern Ireland, on traffic that was terminating on this router.
BT-owned Plusnet also notified its customers of the outage.
The Register has asked BT to comment on this story - we'll update the piece once we hear more. ®
COMMENTS
Re: normal service
> Strangely, my neighbour uses the Post Office and his connection stayed up
TCP over Parcelforce. Most reliable protocol ever, bar the odd dropped packet.
BT Openreach do the "last mile" between exchange and punter
BT Openreach do the "last mile" between exchange and punter (oversimplified, but...).
For retail ISPs such as AAISP, the connectivity between the exchange and the ISP is provided (and in some ways managed) by another piece of BT, BT Wholesale.
Yes it's complicated.
Best just to think of BT as the default provider of frequently overpriced and underperforming voice and Internet services to the naive and ill-informed.
How not to do large-scale safety-critical systems
Just one router did this? What? No hot fail-over? This is the danger of a mono-culture in ubiquitous tech. A single point of failure will always fail... I build tools to monitor very large scale network systems, and our gear can continue operating at full load after 2 failures at any point in the system - hardware or software. The worker drones at BT aren't at fault here - they are doing their job to the best of their considerable abilities. It is management that should be taken out to the woodshed because it is they who likely said that redundant routers, load-balancers, or whatever would cost too much...
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