Verio hosted sites suffer mysterious outage

After approximately sixteen hours of downtime, the issue was resolved. The problem was experienced by surfers who were connected to the Net via BT's service, along with some people who connected via Deutsche Telecom's networks.

According to Verio's vp of operations, Craig Pennington, since the sites involved were still accessible to surfers outside the UK or with different suppliers, Verio classifies this as a service degradation not a complete outage.

As the problem applied only to specific surfers, some sites were mystified until Verio suddenly announced the bug had been cured around 4.30 pm.

Pennington claimed the difficulties only lasted for seven hours. He also attributed the problem to a mysterious bug within the company's Cisco 6500 series routers which were showing everything to be fine, while denying access to the British surfers.

It certainly does appear that during routine maintenance the bug which caused the Brits to be blocked from seeing Verio's hosted sites was introduced.

A source claimed that since the vast majority of Verio's customers are businesses who naturally have deep pockets, we should expect there to be plenty of lawsuits flying around.

However, Pennington said 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 per cent uptime guarantee.

In fact, if anybody is going to do any suing, it might be Verio getting all legal with Cisco. µ

L'INQ
Verio UK