Orcon's 3PM outage

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dauckland

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#32960 27-Apr-2009 16:05

This is beyond belief.
What kind of service provider takes, quite deliberately, its customers offline during business hours????!!!!
Looks like someone at Orcon couldn't be bothered to stay up after hours.
What a laugh..., err, fantastic service. No more for me, thanks.

D

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BDFL - Memuneh
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#209799 27-Apr-2009 16:14

Was it an outage, or was Orcon taking the service intentionally down for some reason?

If it was fault, have you called their help desk to check?

If Orcon intentionally took the service down have you called the help desk to see if it was an emergency procedure that had to be done immediately?

Anything on their status pages or blog?

Are you sure it wasn't a fault on your connection?

You post is not clear on this.

nexttothemoon

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#209801 27-Apr-2009 16:21

Well Orcon has been out for us from 5 pm yesterday... so that's 23 hours worth of outage time. I'm not sure if it had been out before 5 pm yesterday as well but that's when I tried getting on the net yesterday and no go.

I first called tech support last night around 6:30 pm and they tried working with me to see if it was a problem on my end with my computer but after 15 minutes or so of fiddling and trying to see what the issue was... the tech told me he was getting more reports of outages from other techs so the problem wasn't with my end... and it must have been system wide. Apparently I was one of the first to call in reporting problems according to the tech. I found that odd because I had already waited about 1.5 hours before calling in... expecting that the outage problems were a minor blip and Orcon would be back up shortly.

Orcon set up a dial up account this morning (I should have made them set up one for me last night) for us when I called tech support so at least I had some ability to access the net after being without anything from 5 pm yesterday until 8 am this morning.

When I spoke to them they said that their techs were working on the issues and the support desk had no idea what the problem was or how long it would take to fix and they said that it was affecting all Home users New Zealand wide (at least that's what he said).

dauckland

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#209803 27-Apr-2009 16:26

Mauricio.

It was a "planned" outage, hence the "deliberately".

But however planned it was, one doesn't do things like this in the middle of the day, and that's my point.

xpd

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#209806 27-Apr-2009 16:33

Ive spoken with Orcon regarding the outage.... router issues apparently that couldnt wait to be scheduled "off peak" basically.
All our connections have come up again now, so should be resolved.

Gavin / xpd / FastRaccoon / Geek of Coastguard New Zealand

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nexttothemoon

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#209807 27-Apr-2009 16:36

I'm sure Orcon is getting heaps of "praise" from all it's customers today... many of whom have been without net service for close to 24 hours. I would hope they give their customers an explanation and a credit (many of us rely on the net for businesses). They have generally been reliable for us over the last 2 years but this was a major outage.

freitasm

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#209808 27-Apr-2009 16:36

They are asking for people to contact them if still having issues after restaring the modem.

I also saw on their Twitter just a few minutes ago that therey had some problems.

Although I think Twitter is not the way to spread these news...

freitasm

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#209810 27-Apr-2009 16:37

xpd: Ive spoken with Orcon regarding the outage.... router issues apparently that couldnt wait to be scheduled "off peak" basically.

All our connections have come up again now, so should be resolved.

Exactly... Something just can't wait.

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nexttothemoon

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#209812 27-Apr-2009 16:42

As long as people realize this wasn't just a "3 pm outage"... they took everyone down for 1/2 hour to fix an issue (still unexplained) that had taken many of their customers down for the last day.

dauckland

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#209813 27-Apr-2009 16:47

Hmm.
I'm hearing "greater good", "planned", "unexplained".
Nice buzz words. Still don't add up to a great service, my only point again.
This is "let's poke it and see what it does" kind of cowboy mentality.

nexttothemoon

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#209814 27-Apr-2009 16:48

I see Orcon has changed their Network Status updates message... it now says:

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

27/04/09 8:32 am Broadband connection outages for some residential and rural customers.

(Resolved)

Services have been restarted, and Broadband services should be back online. Please ensure your modem has been rebooted.

Our sincerest apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

They have removed the message about the 3 pm outage that took everyone down to finally sort this problem that had been ongoing since yesterday afternoon.

freitasm

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#209816 27-Apr-2009 16:49

From what I read it's now "cowboy". It was something that needed to be fixed, and couldn't wait. If taking the service down for 30 minutes solves the problem for people who couldn't use the service for 18 hours, so be it.

As in the Star Wars universe, Sith happens.

I think everyone needs to be reasonable on a shared service.

Sounddude

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#209820 27-Apr-2009 16:53

We ran into a Juniper bug in the software load that was running on one of the ERX's. It would stop forwarding traffic for some customers.

It took a lot of time to debug and was escalated to Juniper as a P1 fault.

In the end, a reboot was the only option to restore services. However it was only affecting a small number of customers, which is why we wanted to keep the LNS running for as long as we could, but in the end we had no choice.

Sorry for any inconvenience :(

dan

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#209825 27-Apr-2009 16:58

thanks for letting us know the fault. :)

nexttothemoon

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#209829 27-Apr-2009 17:10

So Orcon intentionally kept many of their customers offline for 23 hours because it was only affecting a "small number of customers". Isn't that nice of them. They had since 5 pm yesterday to trouble shoot and fix this problem. If all it took was a reboot... then logically a reboot on a Sunday night or after midnight Sunday would have caused the least problems for everyone AND it would have given net access again for those customers that were without access for a day.

The Orcon help desk techs themselves told me that this was a widespread problem affecting home users (2 different techs said this at two different times... 6:30 pm last night as well as just after 8 am this morning)... so the "spin" that this was only affecting a small number of users doesn't sound plausible.

jermsie

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#209872 27-Apr-2009 18:52

nexttothemoon: So Orcon intentionally kept many of their customers offline for 23 hours because it was only affecting a "small number of customers". Isn't that nice of them. They had since 5 pm yesterday to trouble shoot and fix this problem. If all it took was a reboot... then logically a reboot on a Sunday night or after midnight Sunday would have caused the least problems for everyone AND it would have given net access again for those customers that were without access for a day.

The Orcon help desk techs themselves told me that this was a widespread problem affecting home users (2 different techs said this at two different times... 6:30 pm last night as well as just after 8 am this morning)... so the "spin" that this was only affecting a small number of users doesn't sound plausible.

I think that attitude is a bit unreasonable. Orcon identified the problem and did what they could to restore service as soon as possible. An ISP of their size is not likely to sit on their hands while customers remain offline. Cut them some slack and give them a ring if you have any more problems.

– J

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