Over the course of the last week, there have been a number of problems across the BE network, resulting in significant packet loss for a large number of customers and preventing certain web sites from being accessed.
We apologise for the inconvenience and difficulty this caused. Although we undertook extensive investigations to identify the root cause of the problem, a number of conflicting test results made it difficult to pin point the problem as quickly as we would normally expect.
We can now report that the issues, principally hardware faults, have now been resolved and service across the network has returned to normal levels.
Over the coming days, we’ll be working to better understand how these problems occurred and any lessons we can learn for the future.
---
UPDATE
We have since received information from the BBC who have confirmed they are in the middle of network migration and as a result there could be packet loss. We understand this may be frustrating for our members who use BBC services, but unfortunately this is out of our control and all we can do is wait for the BBC to complete their migration, which is due to be completed on 22 February.
We appreciate your patience with this and will continue to update this blog post with any more information we receive.
UPDATE 28/02/2012
The BBC's migration work was completed last week which means that packet loss to the BBC website was resolved. Separately, we are aware that a small number of customers are continuing to report packet loss to services including iPlayer and Eurogamer. We’re continuing to work closely with these customers and our peering partners to investigate and resolve. Whilst we don't have a fix in place yet for these customers, we understand the frustration and our network team is working hard to get everyone back to full speed. If you're experiencing issues but haven't yet notified our support team then please raise a ticket in the member area.
UPDATE 29/02/2012
Some BE customers are continuing to experience problems when running BBC's iPlayer. This is being caused by our link to the Akamai network, through which BE customers access BBC's video services, operating close to capacity during periods of heavy demand. Although we are increasing the capacity of the link to resolve this problem, the earliest date this can be done is end-April. Obviously, we'll try and get this done earlier if at all possible, and in the meantime we're working with other peering platforms to route overflow traffic away from Akamai during peak usage until the upgrade is completed; from the feedback we've already received via our forum this approach has improved the performance of iPlayer for those customers who've been affected.
Posts
