ISP Trouble

Our Internet Service Provider is down, and has been for the last 24 hours.

That means that not only can we send and receive no email, but the images stored on our ISP’s server are unavailable, and that’s why you see so many “broken images” here at Gates of Vienna.

If you’ve tried to email us and had it bounce, please keep trying. And if you need to get an urgent message to us, leave a comment on this thread.

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The outage occurred through no fault of our ISP, which is a little minnow in the great internet food chain, and depends heavily on the bigger fish further up the chain. It is run by a husband and wife team with a small staff, so we always get prompt and personal service when consulting with them.

Another advantage is the entertaining email we receive whenever troubles occur. Yesterday’s notices are no exception; here’s a sample:

We have just been informed that the technicians have determined the problem, which is apparently a blown circuit card in a telco CO somewhere. Supposedly, a replacement card is enroute to said CO for a replacement; as soon as the card is replaced, service is expected to resume.

*sigh* I wistfully remember the day, only a handful of years ago, when a blown card in a CO was identified and replaced within an hour or two. If an outage was 6+ hours, it was definitely a fiber cut or something equally difficult to find and fix. But that was prior to the current administration’s penchant for doing whatever the big telcos want, allowing them to push the competition out of the water. Now that they have, the service levels are beginning to suck. Now it takes them 6+ hours to simply identify a blown card (which *should* reveal itself fairly instantly)….and they haven’t even fixed it yet, they just know what’s wrong. Grrr.

And then, later in the day:

The trouble ticket with our provider is still open with no ETR. Voices have been raised and we have been assured that it is still being worked on. We are contacting our provider at regular intervals and have been requesting escalations to the highest level possible.

It appears that the delays are due to internal (to our provider) arguments about who is responsible and who actually needs to go the site of the outage. If they would have told us where it is we could have probably made it there ourselves by now ;-)

So… You’ll know we’re back in business when all the images start appearing again (and when your emails to us no longer bounce). In the meantime, we can do all the text-only blogging that we want.