Re: Discussing, or not discussing, major business outages

[Phil Howard <phil () whistler intur net>]

> I am not going to name names, but I have it on good
> authority that late this week a large hosting provider
> went out of business abruptly.  So far, the news that
> it did so has not been discussed anywhere, that I can
> tell, which is starting to disturb me.  There have been
> some significant dislocations related to this shutdown,
> obviously, and this sort of event seems to me to be
> something that involved parties should be at least
> sending warnings out on nanog or other appropriate
> discussion lists.

So far, the lack of anyone named George identifying this failing
business is starting to disturb me.


> I and a third party ISP executive discussed this lack of
> discussion some yesterday; their opinion is that businesses
> and ISPs formerly hosted at the now defunct site are loath
> to admit their connecitvity is down lest their customers
> defect en masse causing a snowball of business failures,
> when they will be up and stable via new providers shortly
> and are not themselves fundamentally unsound.  I understand
> that logic but cannot entirely agree with it.

Some will discover the outage and some will not because they do not
go there during the visit.  Maybe the worry is that if it becomes
well known, those who did not know will now know.


> I would like to see the issue discussed in general terms
> at least; what is appropriate for notifications, what are
> fair responsibilities to customers, the public, other ISPs etc.
> in terms of this sort of event.

How about starting by saying all that you know.

-- 
 --    *-----------------------------*      Phil Howard KA9WGN       *    --
  --   | Inturnet, Inc.              | Director of Internet Services |   --
   --  | Business Internet Solutions |       eng at intur.net        |  --
    -- *-----------------------------*      phil at intur.net        * --