Zen loses its chill: UK biz ISP falls offline for four hours and counting

Beloved business-friendly ISP Zen has been suffering an outage for more than four hours today in the UK – and the carrier has no timetable for when service will be restored. A Zen status notice said that many of its business and residential customers are unable to connect to its network from mid-afternoon, UK time, due to what …

[PNGuinn]

Is this becoming a habit?

Hmmm - Big Thief AGAIN??

See Icon. >>>

[Anonymous Coward]

No problems here

Zen's been fine all day here (south coast) but at work our BT connection was dodgy, didn't have time to investigate properly. Hopefully all's resolved in the morning.

[Deft]

Argggh

I'm a Zen residential customer on one of those area codes. Thank Christ Die Hard 2 is on Film 4 to be my Netflix sub. I'll be writing a strongly worded letter to my MP.

We have family staying at the moment and as the "IT" guy they basically assume the outage is my fault.

[Roger Greenwood]

Re: Argggh

Same here - all connection issues at home are down to "that dodgy wi-fi" or me.

With regard to Zen, they get top marks from me for reliability over many years.

[Sureo]

Re: Argggh

Pointing fingers is a long-time tradition in this industry.

[Dan Harris]

Not BT apparently ...

But then they are being uncharacteristically cagey (not).

[cbars]

Theresa May becomes prime minister

Widespread internet 'malfunctions' occur, repeatedly, in the following weeks.

Cynic? Nah ;)

[Mike Tubby]

Okay here

I'm on Zen with an 80Mbps down/20Mbps up FTTC service at home in 01905 land (the home of Worcester Sauce) and everything's been fine here ;-)

Mike

[Alister]

Re: Okay here

(the home of Worcester Sauce)

Well you should know better, then!

It's Worcestershire Sauce, not Worcester Sauce.

[Arthur the cat]

Re: Okay here

It's Worcestershire Sauce, not Worcester Sauce.

Not in Worcester, it's not. (Said as an ex-local.)

[Ragarath]

Re: Okay here

We've always called it Worcester Sauce, even though it is officially Worcestershire. We live down south too.

[Alister]

Re: Okay here

It's Worcestershire Sauce, not Worcester Sauce.

Not in Worcester, it's not. (Said as an ex-local.)

Ah but it is: It's pronounced Worcester Sauce, but it's spelt Worcestershire Sauce. :)

(Actually, it's pronounced Wuh-Stuh-Shuh round here.)

[Dabooka]

Re: Okay here

Who cares if it's Worcester / Worcestershire?

Everyone up north knows Henderson's Relish is the only one that matters anyway!

[Will Godfrey]

Hmmm

No problem here (in North Kent), but then, I was outside in open air most of yesterday and 'off grid' (Yes I know that's somewhat perverted behavior).

[crediblywitless]

I've been a Zen customer for teens of years now. My area code is on the list mentioned in the first fault. I experienced no loss of service whatsoever. You characterise this as some sort of total failure, and it clearly wasn't.

[Anonymous Coward]

Zen Downtime in our case was approx 8 hours (2 X Business FTTC)

Almost 8 hours downtime for us. Zen did tweet to say that it wasn't BT, but were very scant on the details of their 3rd party supplier. We've been with Zen for over 10 years and they are generally very - very good - however this time their feedback to clients was poor IMHO. I will be expecting a full and frank post mortem on this major outage (210 exchanges in the list) and what steps will be put in place to mitigate the risk on-going. The only upside to this is (by luck as the incident kicked off at 15:50) that we lost only 90 minutes of core business time, however some of our out of office hours processes were affected. My personal Sky LLU connection on the same exchange stayed up through-out.

Zen Business Customer.

[John Robson]

Re: Zen Downtime in our case was approx 8 hours (2 X Business FTTC)

You may well get a post mortem tomorrow. But since they only got it fixed at midnight - I'd give them a few hours...

[Gti Jazz Blue]

Re: Zen Downtime in our case was approx 8 hours (2 X Business FTTC)

This afternoon, tomorrow I don't mind but the key is to be frank about the root cause and inform their clients what plans they have to mitigate the risk ongoing.

[Anonymous Coward]

Our diverse, resilient 200Mbps line showed not a blip.

So it looks like the infrastructure behind it is solid, as it should be for what it costs !!

[Anonymous Coward]

It was down for me for 8 hours. FTTC business. Been with Zen for over 10 years, and this is the first ever outage I can recall. My next door neighbours connection wasn't affected.. also with Zen, but on ADSL, he's been with Zen for less than a year.

My kit reported it as a PPP connection error. (no service available) The DSL was up the whole time.

[Anonymous Coward]

it affected other ISPs too

Gradwell reported the same downtime for all ADSL and FTTC customers - http://www.gradwellstatus.com/viewpost.php?id=884

[Captain Scarlet]

Re: it affected other ISPs too

Hmm my area code is in the list and around that time I suffered horrendously slow upload speeds and packet loss.

BT Infinity though not Zen

[adam payne]

My ADSL was fine for all of yesterday, no connection issues or speed issues at all. Since moving to Zen several years ago I have never had any downtime.

[Custard Fridge]

Zen FTTC was down, Zen leased line was up

And no, I don't just use Zen, for just this reason.

Oh the irony of the BT FTTC line staying up, for once, whist Zen's was down.

And as for my recently cancelled Daisy 4-line Bonded ADSL... never again...

[carl potter]

It wasn't just Zen

The outage also hit Gradwell's ADSL and FTTC customers - http://www.gradwellstatus.com/viewpost.php?id=884