Offices Closed for our Holiday Party

Our offices will be closed from 12pm to 5pm today for our 15th Annual Holiday Party.  Should you need assistance, please leave a voice mail or email support@sonic.net.  As always, Network and Systems Operations are available on their respective hot lines.  -Sonic.net

The website is down

We apologize for the delay in posting this notification, but our systems operations staff are very busy trying to fix the problem. Thank you for your patience, web services should be restored soon!

Update:  Starting at 7:30AM this morning a DDOS directed at one of our hosted websites started to destabilize the cluster causing intermittent failures.  Our initial response was misdirected as we thought it to be a known failure scenario with our hardware load balancers.  We rebooted the load balancers and all services came back up and we believed that the issue had been resolved.  It wasn’t until several subsequent failures occurred that the root cause of the problem was correctly identified and fixed.  Services were fully restored shortly after 9:00AM.  -Kelsey, William, Joey and Nathan

Unexpected T1 Aggregation Router Reload

Today at 9:58AM one of the routers that serves T1 customers in the Sonoma County area unexpectedly reloaded. Service has been restored at this time and we are investigating the cause of the reload. Approximate downtime was 5 minutes.

-Tim and Nathan

DSL Aggregation Router Lockup

Tonight at approximately 1:20 AM, one of our DSL aggregation routers that serves the greater Bay Area had it’s network uplink interface lock up. This problem was resolved by reloading the affected router. At this time, the router is back up and fully operational, and all affected customers should be back online. Total downtime was approximately 15 minutes for affected customers

-Jared

Infrastructure maintenance

Wednesday (09, Dec.) 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

Los Angeles Area Outage

We are currently experiencing an outage affecting our Los Angeles area aggregation equipment. This is affecting all DSL and ATM-based Business-class services. We are working on restoring service and will provide an update shortly.

-Jared and Tim

Update: The outage was caused by a crashed management card in our core ATM switch in Los Angeles. The ATM switch does have a redundant management card, but that card did not load its configuration properly. The ATM switch had to be completely power failed to restore it to service. At this time the switch is up and functioning properly, and all connectivity should be restored. We have also isolated and fixed what caused the backup management card to not load its configuration properly.

Sonic.net Office Phone System Outage

This morning our phone lines in to the Sonic.net office are reporting all circuits busy.  Due to this fact our support, sales, and billing departments are currently unreachable by telephone.  We have reported this outage to our vendor who has found a problem between their network and AT&T. They have dispatched a technician to fix the problem, but have not yet provided us with an estimated time of repair.

This outage affects inbound and outbound calls through our office phone system. No other services are affected by this outage.

Thank you for your patience while we work with our vendor to resolve this issue.

Update — Our phone provider is working on the issue which has resulted in intermittent availability.  Customers that have gotten through to support have been dropped at times due to the work being performed.  We appologize for the inconvenience, and appreciate your patience while we get this issue resolved.

Update — The problem was diagnosed as an overheating Fiber Mux card at the carrier’s central office.  The card has been replaced and service has been restored.

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.