A Hole in the Eastlink Cloud

According to ISN, a logging truck on the other side of the Confederation Bridge drove into the Eastlink fibre that runs to Halifax. This left me without Internet (as ISN’s upstream is Eastlink) and telephone (as Eastlink is my telephone company at the office).

As things turned out, I missed the entire debacle because I was out at meetings. Things appear to be operating normally now.

Comments

Chris's picture
Chris on February 25, 2004 - 20:06 Permalink

It’s a helpless, strange feeling. Great Hobbies is hosted on ISN’s server, we use Aliant DSL in the building there.

To confirm that Eastlink had be downed I attempted a connection to my home desktop, connected to Eastlink high-speed. It failed, of course.

The phone had power, but no dialtone.

oliver b's picture
oliver b on February 25, 2004 - 20:43 Permalink

It’s hard to picture how a truck could collide with a network cable…unless the cable pokes up and runs above ground for a stretch in order to hop onto the bridge for the crossing…and the truck ran off the road into it near the bridge. Even so, I’d have thought they’d minimize the exposed stretch and protect it with guard rails or something. Was Bruce Willis driving the truck? I know it wasn’t Arnold, because he was giving a press conference in Sacramento.

nathan's picture
nathan on February 25, 2004 - 23:46 Permalink

My guess would be the cable was suspended across the road between poles and something tall on the truck snagged it. Anyone know what really happened?

John Morris's picture
John Morris on February 26, 2004 - 05:01 Permalink

This would certainly explain why lots of people were asking if Eastlink was down. Though this is the second outage in the last couple days of an ISP, the other one being U.S.A’s massive backbone provider Level3. Thankfully though, this is one reason why a data center would not do too good on PEI and thus why my servers are off Island! Any possibility Peter of bringing a second pipe into your office? Perhaps a Aliant connection to setup advanced routing?