Beginning on Saturday, Feb. 28th and continuing through Monday, March 1st the BurstNET network experienced extended periods of downtime. The outages appear to have been caused by multiple variables in several facilities. During the outages, extensive testing, maintenance, and replacement of gear in the Scranton facility, in the Philadelphia facility, and in the fiber providers facilities was performed. Much of this maintenance is only possible during a total outage such as this. Possible problematic pieces of equipment and cabling were found in all facilities, including the apparent cause of the recent packet loss issues over the last 2 months (...our tests show 0% packet loss since restoring of service this evening). The basic summary is that the fiber provider had gear that needed to be swapped out due to errors, and BurstNET had one piece of network gear and 2 fiber cables that also showed errors. It is basically impossible to exactly pinpoint which piece caused the issue. Likely, any one of these by themself would have caused difficult to track and diagnose issues (such as low-level packet loss) but, when combined, seemed to trigger this weekends outages.
But, there really wasn't anything I could have done as it was a network issue. Here's an excerpt of the notice sent out by my hosting company about this weekend's problems...
I know we frown upon it, but I need to learn to add multiple attachments from my computer and not hit submit before preview *d'oh*
