A mysterious bug is affecting websites hosted by Verio, awholly owned subsidiary of Japan’s NTT. It has become a recurring problem for nearly 48 hours, and as a consequence, Internet users accessing the Net using British Telecom’s ADSL offering and some that connect few via Deutsche Telekom’s network, T-Online, were temporarily unable to access sites hosted by Verio UK.
Reports vary as to how long it took Verio to identify the problem initially. Our sources claim the first problem lasted from approximately midnight to 4 pm the next day on Friday 30th June. It certainly does appear that the problem emerged during overnight routine maintenance. According to Verio’s vice president of operations, Craig Pennington, the mysterious bug appeared within the company’s Cisco 6500 series routers which were showing everything to be fine, while denying access to specific British Internet users.
Verio now says … “We have seen a recurrence of the recent connectivity issue in the Verio’s London Datacenter. At this time, the vast majority of users are able to connect to the facility as normal – it appears that the issue is affecting a small subset of users primarily originating from British Telecom ADSL.”
Pennington implied that the fault lay within the Cisco OS employed by Verio’s core routers. Subsequently Verio has stated that its “core routers were rebooted in serial; whilst this helped mitigate the problem temporarily, it did not fix it. We are working with Cisco to resolve the problem, and are currently working to roll out an emergency upgrade to the Cisco IOS operating system on the core routers.” Pennington conceded that Verio was looking at the standard SLAs (Service Level Agreements) signed with major customers and predicted that there may have to be some payments made as a consequence. The company offers a 99 percent uptime guarantee.
The frustrating aspect for Verio’s customers has been a lack of information. Some sites weren’t aware anything was awry until Verio sent an email out at 4.30 p.m. last Friday announcing that the problem had been dealt with. These sites had been advising their own customers that the problem probably lay with the surfer’s browser. Today, those same sites appeared blissfully unaware the situation had re-occurred.
Comments have been disabled for this post