Dear Dean Bartorelli,
The below email contains information regarding yesterday's service disruption.
At approximately 2:00PM on Monday, Landscaping works which were being carried out along Hepburn Avenue caused damage to the optical fibre connection which connects Hostaway to QV1 (This is known as the 'Eastern Link'). This is the first network outage that our fibre provider has experienced since the fibre was commissioned in September 2005.
The network design employed by the optical fibre provider (Silk Telecom) uses a redundant link which is intended to automatically take over network traffic in the event of a failure. Clearly this did not occur. We are sill investigating why our supplier's alternate link (The 'Western Link') failed to provide connectivity after the damage to the fibre on Hebpurn avenue.
When it became clear that fibre connectivity would not be restored for a considerable period of time, we decided to restore connectivity across our tertiary link, a carrier grade Microwave link between our data centre and the QV1 building.
Due to differences in the configuration requirements of the fibre versus the microwave connection, this required a member of staff to be despatched to QV1 to remotely reconfigure the connection in conjunction with another technician at the Malaga datacentre.
Partial connectivity was restored at approximately 5:00PM on our transit link and full connectivity, including WAIX, was achieved at approximately 7:00PM.
Full connectivity over the fibre link was restored at approximately 9:00AM Tuesday 8th May.
Please note that any mail sent during the outage yesterday will have been delayed. Depending on the configuration of the sending machine, that delayed mail will most likely have either arrived at our servers last night, or will arrive at some stage this morning. Since the resending schedule is determined by the sending and not the receiving server, we are unfortunately not able to provide a more precise estimate as to when delayed mail will arrive. We expect that by now, most mail should have been delivered.
We know that for many customers yesterday's outage was a frustrating period, and we sincerely apologise for any inconvenience this outage caused. We are ourselves extremely frustrated that the backup features of the provider we have chosen did not function as they were expected to, and we are committed to ensuring the problems experienced yesterday are not repeated.
Regards,
The team at Hostaway