Month: November 2009

Telephone outage

This morning our phone lines are reporting all circuits busy.  We are working with our vendors to troubleshoot the problem but we do not currently have an ETR.   Telephone support, sales, and billing are currently unavailable.  Thank you for your patience during this time.

Update: Our vendor has found a problem between their network and AT&T.  They have dispatched a technician to fix the problem but have not provided us with an ETR.  As always we are available for troubleshooting at support@sonic.net. This outage only affects inbound and outbound calls through our office phone system.  Dial-up services are not affected by this outage.

Update: A problem, localized to the fiber-optic cable at  AT&T’s central office, has been resolved. Service to our phone system has been fully restored.

DSL Aggregation Equipment Failure

One of our DSL aggregation routers handling customers in California’s LATA 1 (largely the San Francisco area) started having problems at approximately 10:41pm tonight. Customers experienced a complete service outage until 10:47pm, at which point we were able to restore partial service. We’re presently working to move the affected customer’s service to alternate equipment, which will involve 10-15 minutes worth of additional downtime in the near future. At present, customers on this particular piece of aggregation gear are experiencing ~7% packet loss. We’ll update this entry as our work progresses.

-Nathan, Matt and Jared

Update 11:14pm:

The problem turned out to be a failing ATM port inside of our network. We’ve migrated all traffic to a hot-spare port and service has returned to normal.

Infrastructure maintenance.

Update : (0123 20, Nov.) Maintenance complete; everything is fully operational again.

Tonight (19, Nov.) we will be performing maintenance on some of the internal networking and NetApp storage filers that many of our servers depend on (including e-mail and web); from 11pm to 1am the following morning you may see a slow down in performance when retrieving or sending e-mail or accessing your web content as we perform our maintenance.

-Augie, Aaron

Large DDoS Attack

This morning at 11AM, a large DDoS was aimed at a server in our colocation facility in Santa Rosa. The DoS was large enough (1.5 million pps) to disrupt connectivity to our Santa Rosa datacenter, which would have affected access to mail and web services hosted by Sonic. The DoS was blocked by 11:07 AM, and no further ill effects should have been felt after that point.

-Jared

POP3 problems

We experienced a brief issue with our POP3 (email) performance today due to a problem with our load balancing servers. This issue has been resolved and all POP3 services should be working normally at this time.

DSL Performance Problems in LATA1

This morning at about 9:30 AM we began tracking a problem that was causing some DSL customers in the Bay Area to experience poor speeds and performance. We have tracked the cause of the problem back to a failing ATM card in one of our core routers, and have removed that card from service. At this time, all DSL should be functioning normally, but we continue to monitor the situation.

-Jared and Nathan