Announcements

Data Center Backbone Connectivity Issues

01/11/2008 00:00

At approximately 8am on Friday, October 31th, a large “backbone” provider, Sprint, stopped routing traffic from Sprint-connected customers to our upstream provider, Cogent, who is the largest provider of internet connectivity in the USA. This is due to a business disagreement between Sprint and Cogent, and it means that customers who are connected via ISP’s that partner exclusively with Sprint may not be able to access their sites hosted with us. Fortunately, most internet providers do not connect to the internet via only one provider, so connections can be routed via other links; however, smaller ISP’s (especially regional internet providers) that connect to the internet via only a single Sprint connection are being affected by this issue.

Cogent has offered all Sprint-only customers a free temporary connection while Sprint and Cogent negotiate a more permanent peering agreement.Please understand that this issue is not directly under our control, and we are confident that Sprint will re-activate the connections that they have disabled in the very near future. If you are unable to access your website at this time, it is possible that your ISP is only using Sprint (and has not yet activated a temporary connection with Cogent), or that your ISP is experiencing other routing issues where connections to Cogent are not being routed around the issues with Sprint. Also, please note that this problem affects all customers of Cogent, not only our customers — so you may not be able to access other major websites that are connected via Cogent.

Cogent has assured us that the rapid resolution of this issue, and quick deployment of temporary connections to ISP’s who have been abandoned by Sprint, is their top priority.Thank you for your patience during this issue, and we will continue to monitor this situation. If you continue to experience connectivity issues, you may wish to contact your ISP for further guidance. The following links are to news articles regarding this situation:

http://tinyurl.com/connectivity-issues
http://tinyurl.com/connectivity-issues2
http://tinyurl.com/connectivity-issues3

To assist our technicians is investigating this issue, please perform the following steps to trace your internet connect to your website if possible:

Click the “Start” button in the bottom left corner of your computer
Click “Run”
Type the following command, then click OK: cmd
At the prompt, type the following command then press Enter. Be sure to replace ‘yoursitedomain.com’ with your domain name: tracert yoursitedomain.com
Once the test completes and you are returned to the command prompt, right click on the command window and choose “Mark” · Use the mouse cursor to click and select the results of the tracert test, then right click again to have the selection automatically copied to your clipboard
Open a support ticket and paste the results of your tracert test into the support ticket by right-clicking in the support ticket text area and choosing “Paste”

<< Back

View RSS Feed