Fiber Link Outage Forces Us Back onto Older, Slower Circuits

Blech.  We were offline for nine hours today.  That was really, really painful.  I know it was painful for our users also.

From our perspective, this outage was as sudden as a bolt of lightning.  One moment things were working; the next moment, nada.  The problem was with our new fiber Gigabit ethernet link that runs from our offices in Redmond, Washington to our ISP's data center in downtown Seattle.  If you haven't read the play-by-play account of the problem and how it was diagnosed, feel free to check out our Status Blog entry.

At this point, there are two things that we want everyone to know:

1.) We have given all of our subscribers an additional week of service for free because of this outage.  Your account's expiration date has already been updated to reflect that additional time.

2.) For the next couple of days, our site might be somewhat slower than it has been.  The older T3 circuits that we are now using can only handle 180 megabits of traffic at a time whereas the new fiber link which broke was able to handle 1024 megabits of traffic.  Until that fiber link is fixed, the site will have to slow down some.

Again, our apologies for this prolonged outage and for any slowness that you see over the next couple of days.  I'll be hard at work pressing our network vendors for answers and better solutions to prevent this kind of thing from happening again.

- Chip