Cox Internet Outage
by Patrick Ruffini :: August 8th, 2007 1:07 pmI am posting this not because I think this information is useful to my regular readers, but because I’m hoping to create a record of it in Technorati and Google Blog Search for anyone else trying to figure out what’s going on.
For two days now, I haven’t been able to connect to several sites like Google, CNN, and Digg. For someone who relies extensively on Google Apps for email and Google Docs, this is pretty frustrating. I have Cox high-speed in Northern Virginia. I checked all the sites that were blinking-out in my feedreader, and they all map back to 64.x.x.x IP addresses. This is clearly a network issue.
As of this morning, Cox service reps were simultaneously unaware of this issue, or tried to pass it off a separate California/Arizona issue described on this blog. That issue has been noted on Cox’s Virginia network status page for about a week (odd since it’s all the way across the country).
Clear communication about service outages is critical, whether through network status pages, company blogs, or user forums. Last week when Google Analytics was out for 36 hours, Google failed to note it on their blog until the third day. The blog didn’t have comments, so users couldn’t converse directly on it, though the support forum was all abuzz about it.
In an age when consumers can create a user-generated backlash to outages and subsequent nonresponsiveness (emphasis on the nonresponsiveness) by posting it to their blogs, companies need to be more on top of alerting users to known problems.
Tagged: cox 
internet network outage user generated content virginia
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