At approx 1:10pm today, we experienced a network issue. After investigating, we saw what appeared to be a Layer 2 loop within our network. We have mitigation against these loops, so this was unusual. After detailed investigation, we discovered that a Cisco 3850 series switch located in Manchester MA2 had… Continue reading
We’ve just been informed of some maintenance tomorrow between 7am and 7pm UK local time that may affect 2 legs of our metro ethernet ring in Manchester. Our metro ethernet ring should automatically re-route traffic via its alternate routes (BT, VirginMedia, Vodafone), but may cause a couple of periods of… Continue reading
To continue our network upgrades, we have ordered upgrades of our metro ethernet circuits, and IP Transit feeds. This will bring our metro ethernet rings up to a minimum of 10Gbit/s per segment. It will also increase our external connectivity to multiples of 10Gbit/s. Lead times for 10Gbit/s upgrades… Continue reading
At 10:07pm this evening, our monitoring detected the loss of our Metro Ethernet Ring links from one our suppliers. Our ring automatically reconverged as designed. At 10:13pm this evening, we saw these links reconnect. No planned maintenance is known, so we have raised a query with the supplier and… Continue reading
At approx 2:56pm UK local time today, we saw packet loss across our entire metro network for around 4 minutes. Initial diagnostics showed that one of our core network ring Cisco 3850-series switches had failed (it was stuck in a boot loop with failing self-tests). Ordinarily, this should not have… Continue reading
We saw our Vodafone Fibre circuit between BOL8 and LD2 drop at 8:38pm this evening. We have reported the fault to Vodafone to investigate. Our ring automatically re-routed via its alternate paths as expected without any customer outages. More updates will be added via comments as we receive them.
We will be performing network upgrades across our entire network (Manchester, Bolton, and London) shortly. We will begin with the Bolton and Manchester networks during March 2018. This work will involve replacing our entire switching network with new Cisco switches operating at both Layer 2 and Layer 3 modes. This… Continue reading
At approx. 1:00pm today, we received a DDoS attack against our primary authorative nameserver (ns3). This DDoS attack was a memcached amplification attack which saturated our external connections and caused packet loss to our Bolton and Manchester networks. By 1:30pm, we had filtered the traffic and all packet loss should… Continue reading
We currently have a BT Fibre Fault on our metro ethernet ring which Openreach are investigating. As designed, our ring continued to operate at reduced resilience with no loss of service. There are no anticipated service issues as a result of this fault. Once BT have investigated and restored service,… Continue reading
We have been notified today by Virgin Media that they will be performing maintenance on 20th October 2017 between midnight and 6am UK local time which will affect one of our fibre circuits that forms our metro ring. Although the maintenance window is 6 hours long, the anticipated circuit outage… Continue reading