Network Maintenance @ midnight

Last night, January 25th, 2007, there was a brief outage that effected our entire network at 2 am – 2:30 am.

Our network people had to take down both of the redundant gateway switches for maintenance (big iron 1 and big iron 2) resulting in all external traffic completely stopping. The switches were dropping packets and had to have some hardware replaced.
Some of our customers did not know what this was a scheduled outage and we were flooded with email as soon as the services were back up. So I want to take this time to point out the Network Status page which has a running schedule of all upcoming maintenance (network and server).

The vast majority of such repairs do not result in outages, since just one switch at a time is usually being worked on, but this was a very special event. They explained why both of the switches had to be worked on at the same time, but not being a network person, it was a bit over my head.

Artur January 25, 2007