Outages and Performance Problems that Affected CTDATA Customers Last Week
Dave Aiello wrote, "Last week, a number of CTDATA customers experienced complete outages on their email servers and websites as a result of an Internet service disruption between our colocation provider and a major telecommunications company. This was the result of a billing dispute that was entirely unrelated to CTDATA's accounts payable."
"I am extremely upset with the parties to this dispute, because their quarrel resulted in business interruptions for many of our customers, and indefinite responses from us to our customers regarding when their service would be restored. Our customers know that we haven't had a sustained service outage in a long time, and we work hard to maintain our reputation for dependability."
"The disruption lasted from mid-afternoon Wednesday, November 6, until sometime on Friday, November 8, with the exact restoration time somewhat dependent upon the client's network configuration. We apologize for the disruption and are instituting changes to our network configuration in order to avoid disruptions of this nature in the future."
Dave Aiello continued:
In addition, there was a severe network performance degradation on Monday, November 10. The problem stemmed from execessive network traffic generated by a virus-infected server in our colocation facility. Although this server is not owned or managed by CTDATA, it still affected our customers' ability to access their email servers and web sites.This problem was remedied quickly by colocation facility management. It took the infected server off-line. The long term fix for this sort of problem is to segregate the network at the colocation facility and institute explicit bandwidth limitations for each server (also known in the industry as "traffic shaping").
The performance problem that occurred on Monday was not related to the outage that occurred last week. We will do our best to avoid this sort of problem in the future by tighter network management. But, we can never totally eliminate this sort of problem unless we open our own Internet data center.