main

Damaged undersea cable blamed for UK Net problems

alowerevil   on 27 November 2003 - 10:24 · 27 comments & 4036 views

Advertisement (Why?)
A damaged undersea transatlantic cable is being blamed for causing havoc for Net and phone users in the UK last night. A number of ISPs are understood to have been hit by the problem, which surfaced (the problem, not the cable) yesterday afternoon at around 4pm. The cable - which is owned by a consortium of telcos - is believed to have hit a snag (figuratively speaking, of course) somewhere off the French coast. France Telecom, which is responsible for that section of cable, is sending a boat out to examine the damage.

At this stage it's not known exactly what the damage is or what caused it. However, the effects of the incident were felt in the UK last night. BT has confirmed that some of its voice services were hit by the outage, while NTL blamed the cable problem for downing its Net service - including web browsing, email, ftp and newsgroups - for around eight hours. The service was back up and running by around 1am today, although the cableco has conceded that some punters may still be suffering problems this morning.

Telewest confirmed that its customers also experienced difficulties accessing email and personal webspace for around four hours. Although it's still investigating the matter, a spokesman acknowledged that the problems could be a result of the damaged cable. And Tiscali said it was unaffected by the incident, although some of its punters may have found accessing US-based sites slower than usual.

News source: The Register


Changes and Updates for 4.8
• A new eBay pane has been added
• A new Dictionary pane has been added
• A new Quote pane has been added
• New custom image panes have been added
• An alarm has been added to the clock pane
• A calendar and clock display has been added to the new expanded part of the clock pane
• Alerts have been added to the calendar pane
• A clipboard pane that supports standard text and rich text has been added
• The weather channel feed has been repaired
• The stock watcher has been repaired
• The appearance of the weather channel and web search have been improved
• The appearance and functionality of the command line pane has been improved
• The volume control now has a context menu for accessing volume settings
• Bugs related to the bar not positioning itself when the screen resolution changes or the taskbar repositioning have been resolved
• Bugs related to the bar not hiding itself when a full screen app is detected have been resolved
• Control buttons and the option for continuous scrolling have been added to the news ticker
• An option to display the Mother Board Monitor display's temperatures in Fahrenheit has been added

Fixes for v0.981
• The network monitor on the Adv System Monitor has been repaired
• The BBC Weather pane expanding bug has been fixed
• The custom image pane bugs have been repaired
• The eBay pane has been fixed
• The pane maximize bug has been fixed
• The taskbar button right click bug has been fixed
• The font for dates and times can now be changed in config.exe if they are not displayed correctly
• The media players have been improved
• There is now an option to display the alarm settings by double clicking, and the calendar by single clicking for the clock pane
• Several visual enhancements have been made, including fading button effects and new themes.


Post a comment · Send to friend Comments · There are 27 additional comments
(1 reply) #1 SouL2kEEp on 27 Nov 2003 - 11:07
not only the UK was affected... the ISP im working for was affected here in CYPRUS bcos we are feeded with bandwith by THAT...
#1.1 K3EnU on 27 Nov 2003 - 17:00
lol
(2 replies) #2 h99120351 on 27 Nov 2003 - 11:13
HAHA, French can't do anythin right
#2.1 K3EnU on 27 Nov 2003 - 17:02
at least we don't have power failures for days like in usa
#2.2 aereux on 27 Nov 2003 - 22:16
K3EnU, not to be disrespectful, but we weren't the ones having thousands of people die in the hot summer heat, like in France.
#3 Godzilla on 27 Nov 2003 - 11:16
QUOTE
which surfaced (the problem, not the cable)

I choked laughing
#4 joa on 27 Nov 2003 - 11:24
Well I didn't
#5 matric on 27 Nov 2003 - 11:29
LOL language in context is great...
#6 YaZoR on 27 Nov 2003 - 11:54
nildram and pipex uk isp's were fine for me
#7 deadmonkey on 27 Nov 2003 - 12:56
That was excellently written alowerevil

I am on NTL and had no problems (except with NTL's crappy proxy servers, but that has been a problem for days!)

EDIT: Just realised it was written by The Register. I should have expected it from them
(1 reply) #8 ms998 on 27 Nov 2003 - 13:01
Why should an undersea cable connecting Europer to US affect personal web space in the UK?

Are Telewest's servers that borked that they route via the US.
#8.1 UKer on 27 Nov 2003 - 15:48
I don't know if it's true in the case of Telewest, but a great number of UK ISPs do route to Europe via. the US, lukily mine (Nildram) has a direct connection to Europe, I really pitty those who will get the performance hit from the re-routing. For those interested see www adslguide.org.uk for advise.
#9 nw|raptor on 27 Nov 2003 - 13:31
lol... "which surfaced (the problem, not the cable)" im still laughing...

/Raptor
(1 reply) #10 antny_uk on 27 Nov 2003 - 13:48
Im on NTL and couldn't get any connection on tuesday 6pm - 11pm. Fine now though. (in NW England btw..)

Why would one cable cause this trouble? I thought the point of the internet and the way it works is to find a route even if some cables/servers are out??? or am i just being stupid?

#10.1 Budious on 27 Nov 2003 - 14:36
depending on the routing protocol used, it would take some bit of time for the routers to update their routing tables to represent the no longer available route, also with the amount of bandwidth provided by that single cable, there may not have been enough fallback routes to provide redundancy.
(1 reply) #11 Gary_Player on 27 Nov 2003 - 15:47
Crap, that sucks...I remember when the hyper-pipeline between Seattle and AK was damaged, I couldnt check out neowin for like 2 days...spent the entire time crying in the corner of my cell
#11.1 kairon on 27 Nov 2003 - 21:34
Wasn't aware they had computers in jail cells.
#12 neel2k on 27 Nov 2003 - 15:48
I think NTL are just shifting the blame, my NTL conection broke, but when I changed DNS servers (to a BT openworld one) my internet connection was fine again.
QUOTE
NTL blamed the cable problem for downing its Net service - including web browsing, email, ftp and newsgroups

If the servers that my NTL webspace is on are in the UK then why should FTP to my webspace be affected by this outage? Same for email.

Last edited by 23058 on 27 Nov 2003 - 16:05
(1 reply) #13 nanackle on 27 Nov 2003 - 16:12
big deal
#13.1 Mav Phoenix on 27 Nov 2003 - 16:50
It is to some people...
(4 replies) #14 Galley on 27 Nov 2003 - 17:06
Seriously, is that how communications get across the Atlantic, a big freaking cable that runs on the ocean floor? Is there one across the Pacific as well?
#14.1 dismuter on 27 Nov 2003 - 17:25
High tech fiber optics cable, not just a freaking cable
#14.2 bluebsh on 27 Nov 2003 - 19:14
there are many many cables. Look at a backbone network chart across the world, you can see a hundred or so very high speed fiber optic cables spanning the oceans. Most of them are backed up with satalite links now also. Which is a slower method of communicating compared to fiber optic comunication.
#14.3 Inertia on 28 Nov 2003 - 02:16
wouldnt be hard fo0r the aliens just to draw circles around each piece of land with magic cable cutting lazers and they could kill our main comms links
#14.4 theprotege on 28 Nov 2003 - 09:40
thats about all they can use, unless they want to use satelite, which is affected by the weather and is delayed...or microwave, that requires direct line of site and decent weather, not mention anything crossing that path for a more than short period of time would be "nuked" (birds, humans on a tall ship, etc...not the safest hardware, but by far the fastest).
#15 skaife on 28 Nov 2003 - 03:23
Kinda reminds me of Sphere...
#16 theprotege on 28 Nov 2003 - 09:37
You can add France to that list too...I was wondering why the hell i couldn't reach any US site that went through Ashburn, VA...damn those dirty fish, damn them all to hell..

Commenting has either been disabled on this article or you are not logged in. Click here to login or register, its free!

Note: Anonymous commenting is disabled in order to keep the quality of responses to a high standard.

Advertisement (Why?)