Major Service Outages

What is an Emergency Nationwide MSO?

An Emergency Nationwide MSO is something major affecting lots of lines at once. It could be a large fault in our network or in the back-haul networks such as BT, or something more subtle like a major routing issue or problem on a peering network.

We'd expect an Emergency nationwide MSO to only be reported if it is affecting 100s or 1,000s of customers.

The MSO text system is aimed at people who are in a position to tell that there is a major problem - people that have lines on lots of sites or have networking expertise to identify core network issues. We have some very technically competent customers and we appreciate that customers can sometimes see things before we can, so we appreciate your support.

Most things we can detect, but not always. There could be subtle routing issues or network issues which we cannot see. If you are sure this is affecting multiple lines and the status pages do not show the problem and no staff are on irc please do send an MSO text. This is one of the main areas where MSO texts are of use. Discussing with others on irc first helps confirm the scale of the issue, and whether we are aware already.

What is not an emergency nationwide MSO?

We appreciate that it is frustrating when your Internet does not work and for you this is major, but normal Internet service / broadband faults are handled during working hours. This is not because we are lazy or that one customer with a fault is not important - it is because almost all single line faults cannot be fixed any more quickly with 24 hour support as they involve booking engineers (whether to work on your line or at the exchange, etc). If you have a single line fault (i.e. not a major service outage) there really is no point in waking people up in the middle of the night so please only use the MSO texts for actual major outages affecting multiple lines. Here are a few tips on helping you decide.

• A major outage is not just one line, or just your street - if you cannot tell there is a general problem do not send an MSO text.
• If you have any internet access by other means please check the status pages and irc channel first.
• A phone line not working is not a broadband MSO - the phone line will need fixing first and that normally means an engineer has to be booked (which is working hours). Do check the line first.
• A fault that has been going on for days is not an MSO (or if it is then we already know about it), so don't MSO text.
• Even if it is just your line, if you have Internet via any other means please do check irc. Staff are often on-line in their own time and happy to help and other customers can offer useful advice. They can also confirm if the issue seems to be more major, or just you. If you have Internet access then our control pages also offer various tests you can perform on the line to try and find the cause and help speed up the fault repair process.
• Do not send MSO texts for anything else such as accounting queries.