[Newfie]

Yesterday we had a major cell/internet/land line outage in Atlantic Canada. Bell has explained it away as multiple fiber optic cuts. But that does not in any way match the pattern of loss. VOCM had a map,showing outage areas that, from what I experienced was accurate. But that map has been removed. It appears to have effected St John's, PEI, Gander, and Halifax but not Clarenville and many other communities in the wide spread region. At least some maps showed the outage extending into parts of Ontario. It makes no sense.

I'm calling baloney on the Bell explanation unless some further credible information is provided.

Service was lost in PEI and in Parts of Newfoundland. They are far apart and it's hard to see how any combination of cables could effect both. If it did, then you would expect the whole island of Newfoundland to be down, but it wasn't. Areas here and there were down, but some areas, in between, we're not effected. Some areas lost land line and Internet, some did not.

The pattern observed was much more in line with a software provisioning error, a failure in some class of equipment (say a Cisco XYZ router model all reset at the same time) or a cyber hack.

The outage maps shown on CTV are highly inaccurate.

https://beta.theglobeandmail.com/news/n ... dmail.com&

http://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/phone-serv ... oPlay=true

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scot ... -1.4235224

https://www.halifax.ca/home/news/emerge ... lar-outage

[Cog]

Its going to be ok. Even while you slumber, hard-working technicians of Bell Atlantic are hard at work restoring your service. We thank you for your patronage and hope you will continue to use us for many years to come.

[Outcast_Searcher]

The pattern observed was much more in line with a software provisioning error, a failure in some class of equipment (say a Cisco XYZ router model all reset at the same time) or a cyber hack.

Problems with software upgrades/changes still can happen a lot. And even if testing is done, it may not catch all the problems, such as a stress/load problem that only shows up over time.

I spent the last 17 years of my career dealing with database system software and rolling out maintenance and upgrades for IBM for a LOT of customers on mainframes, so I have a pretty good clue what I'm talking about here.

What I wonder is if what you were told was the outage cause is the STANDARD boilerplate message that they say by default until they are given some "official" reason from some official source.

For example, we've had some power outages affecting me recently, but with my whole house generator I'm only out about 30 seconds. When I check the maps from the power company, they ALWAYS seem to give an estimated fix time for ANY outage in a particular area as roughly 2 to 2.5 hours out, or several hours from when the outage was first reported.

I could be wrong, but I'm betting they have learned that it's better to give some standard not-too-alarming kind of estimate, and do that consistently. This probably works a lot better than "we don't know yet" or "this looks like a bad one -- it could be 12 hours", etc. (Then they just move out the target fix time a few hours at a time on the bad ones, and hope not too many people get too mad).

Also, admitting software rollout failures makes an outfit look incompetent, and might give rise to spurious lawsuits, lots of complaints, BS from politicians, etc. So I'll bet they don't like to disclose such things unless pressed or when legally required to.

It's too bad that the honest truth isn't the policy in 99% of the cases, even if it's "we don't know yet", but politics and lawsuits being what they are -- the public gets what it deserves, based on how the masses behave, over time.

[Outcast_Searcher]

Its going to be ok. Even while you slumber, hard-working technicians of Bell Atlantic are hard at work restoring your service. We thank you for your patronage and hope you will continue to use us for many years to come.

And depending on where you live, if you don't like it, you might not have all that many alternatives, especially better ones, anyway.

[ROCKMAN]

I suspect it was just a matter of time before TPTB realized that there were certain Canadians that didn't have anything worth listening to so they cut then off. LOL.