Oh, it’s been a nightmare here the day!

We have received complaints from some of our customers for the past few days that they were having problems accessing certian sites hosted with a certian ISP located in Northern Ireland. I started investigating this yesterday along with our own Networks Ops, and we found that there wasn’t a problem on our end and passed this back to said ISP. This ISP however, have insisted that they do not have any problems on their end either, and that’s the way its been going the past day or so.

Added to that, members of staff for said ISP somehow ended up with my direct dial number, and have been hounding me for the day to sort out the problems with ‘our network’.

Given that we’ve tested with routes through INEX, AMS-IX and LINX and have experienced the same problems with all 3 routes, and that there doesn’t appear to be anything more that we can do.

The funny thing is that traces to all the sites in question appear to be fine with near perfect transmit times, its just traffic is crawling, with simple webpages taking 2 minutes to load in some cases.

Further to this, the guys in Esat and elsewhere have looked at some of the sites we’re having problems with and have been able to get into them fine, which would suggest a problem on our end, but again we’ve been unable to find anything.

The last thing to take place was that the ISP’s networks guru’s were off to investigate things on their end again, and so far I haven’t heard anything from them in about an hour, which has been the most amount of time I haven’t heard anything from them all day, so I’m hoping they’ve found something and are too ashamed to call me back!