Saturday, September 29, 2012

Rogers goes down. Ears turn red

News from Pitkinville - okay, southern Ontario, but Pitkinville sounds so much more sardonic - is that Rogers, the largest telecom company in the known universe, is experiencing a major outage. As a result, Internet users in Canada's most populous zone are stuck sending each other messages via carrier pigeon.

I know this to be true because I learned it all on the Internet - TechCrunch article here. Which, for me, apparently still works. Because I'm not using Rogers. Please don't hate me.

Your turn: What do you do when your Internet goes down? I lean toward reading, walking and speaking with real, live people. What's your backup plan?

Update - 9:00 p.m. - Heard from Melissa James on Facebook. She sat on the phone waiting for someone from Rogers. When she got through, this is what she was told: "It'ss not just Rogers customers, but Bell and others because it's a DNS problem. If you type in Google's IP address (74.125.226.84 ) and it appears, your service with your provider is fine, just the internet (DNS) is down." This is confirmed by one of the top telecom analysts I know, Mark Tauschek: "Apparently DNS is the culprit - try 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 for DNS servers." So...change your DNS settings and you should be fine.

Update - 9:04 p.m. - Stuart Clark and Derek Silva - more uber-geeky members of our city's technology elite, and friends of mine - share this advice: Use OpenDNS's DNS servers. 208.67.222.222 & 208.67.220.220. Derek - head honcho of Orpheum - also says "it's just Rogers' DNS servers that are flaky, not the network itself."

Update - 9:12 p.m. - Tom confirms the following: "Using openDNS settings 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220 and working well now."

Update - 9:15 p.m. - CTV anchor Tony Grace just tweeted this: ROGERS OUTAGE: MP @tonyclementcpc, tech expert @carmilevy & others among the many tweeting about a widespread #Rogers internet outage today.

Update - 9:17 p.m. - Leanne Fenton reports from London: "Cable seems back with a reboot and twitter is working on WIFI for the 1st time in hours... Still sketchy access on most sites tho."

Update - 9:20 p.m. - Stuart Clark just posted this update to his blog.

Update - 9:27 p.m. - Just noticed the one tweet from Rogers on this issue. Follow @RogersHelps and re-read that single tweet if it'll make you feel better.

Update - 9:29 p.m. - Hallie Moyse, in whose house I pretty much grew up, reports possible spread to Montreal. Tracking comments on my Facebook page here.

Update 9:31 p.m. - Oops, I spoke too soon. @RogersHelps just tweeted again. TWO tweets. I hope they're paid by the word.

Update - 9:34 p.m. - TechCrunch reporting service returning for some. Article updated here.

Update - 9:50 p.m. - DSLreports.com community thread here.

Update - 9:53 p.m. - Darrell Etherington is the Toronto-based TechCrunch writer who's covering this story. Follow him on Twitter at @drizzled.

Update - 9:55 p.m. - Rogers reporting the following from its Twitter account (link):

"Internet issues some wireline / wireless customers were experiencing should now be resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience."

What are you seeing?

4 comments:

Unknown said...

I got around it with the google DNS 8.8.8.8.

Of course I had to tether my iphone to even get that info. We pay too much to ever put up with this.

Stuart Clark said...

The problem seems to be Roger's DNS servers which is like a phone book that converts sitenames like www.cbc.ca into a ip address. Until They fix their DNS servers you can't access websites by name.

If you comfortable poking around your router config you can change the DNS settings to another server. I use the following.

8.8.8.8 (Google) or 208.67.222.222 & 208.67.220.220 (OpenDNS).

CorvusCorax12 said...

i use Roger because where i live the choices are limited, specially if you want high speed :(

Mike said...

I ditched Rogers DNS almost 8 months ago, when I identified that their servers were randomly failing to respond to queries sporadically. Their support people refused to even acknowledge there was a problem ("no other customers have complained about flaky DNS"), let alone fix it.

I didn't notice any problems yesterday.