Superior Downtime
The iPhone sings its 6.45am alarm so I pick it up and start scrolling.
I know I shouldn’t. I am aware that I should stretch or journal or meditate.
But I don't. I start scrolling.
Something’s not right. The internet seems slow. Not entirely broken, but broken enough to be unusable.
I toggle wi-fi on and off. Still slow.
I forget the network and re-join. Still slow.
I turn the bloody phone off and on again. Frustration grows.
I get up and turn the router off, turn the phone off, turn everything on again, rejoin networks – and I’m still surfing through digital treacle.
Now I’m pissed off. I'm going to have to figure it out. But I have no desire to fix the internet at 7am. I want The Universe to let me mindlessly scroll before making a cup of tea.
My frustration is escalating, so I put on my running gear and leave the house. I grumble, grunt, and swear through the first couple of kilometres. And after completing six, I’m in a better frame of mind and ready to take another look at the problem.
I’m no network engineer, but I know enough to be dangerous. I open the laptop, login to the router and notice that some diagnostic checks are failing at what looks to be the DNS level. So I find another configuration panel that tells me which DNS addresses are being used.
I ping one of them, and it’s not looking good
--- 217.169.20.21 ping statistics ---
22 packets transmitted
8 packets received
63.6% packet loss
Maybe there’s an issue with that DNS server? Maybe I should use Google’s one … what is it? 4.4.8.8 or something like that. So I ping that to see if it’s different. And it’s not. Damn.
I scratch my head, and decide that maybe it’s worth calling my provider, Andrews & Arnold.
They answer within a few rings. (They always do, it’s wonderfully refreshing.) I give them my postcode, and they tell me there’s a big City Fibre outage. They also explain they have a status page up, and any updates will be posted there.
Now I feel stupid for getting so frustrated about it. Nothing I could’ve done would’ve enabled me to doom scroll this morning. And I feel doubly stupid for wanting to do that in the first place.
The status page itself is absolutely excellent. No corporate bullshit (except for the stuff they have to quote from CityFibre). Instead we get clear data about what they’re observing.
There’s a hastily put together graphic of areas that are “OK” and “NO OK” – which is really quite lovely in its get-the-job-done-rawness.
There’s charts I don’t fully understand, but definitely correlate with something going horribly wrong between 2 and 3am.
And then there’s this comment:
MANY of our CityFibre circuits are showing 140ms Latency and around 60% packet loss.
Hang on – that’s exactly what I was observing in my ping! 63.6% packet loss.
Data is matching up. What I am observing correlates with what these clever folks are observing. And I feel a renewed sense of calm.
The calmness comes from a certainty that there’s nothing more I can do. I decide to have a shower and potter around the garden until somebody somewhere fixes the problem.
Of course, by the time I’ve had a shower that certain someone has fixed the problem. No gardening today, then.
*
In Rory Sutherland’s book Alchemy, he describes the brilliance of Uber’s map.
it does not reduce the waiting time for a taxi but simply makes waiting 90% less frustrating
In other words, the quantity of the waiting is the same, but the quality of the waiting is superior.
The same is true of an Andrews & Arnold status page.
All ISPs that use the underlying CityFibre network likely experienced the same quantity of downtime.
But my downtime was, eventually, superior.
The iPhone sings its 6.45am alarm so I pick it up and start scrolling.
I know I shouldn’t. I am aware that I should stretch or journal or meditate.
But I don't. I start scrolling.
Something’s not right. The internet seems slow. Not entirely broken, but broken enough to be unusable.
I toggle wi-fi on and off. Still slow.
I forget the network and re-join. Still slow.
I turn the bloody phone off and on again. Frustration grows.
I get up and turn the router off, turn the phone off, turn everything on again, rejoin networks – and I’m still surfing through digital treacle.
Now I’m pissed off. I'm going to have to figure it out. But I have no desire to fix the internet at 7am. I want The Universe to let me mindlessly scroll before making a cup of tea.
My frustration is escalating, so I put on my running gear and leave the house. I grumble, grunt, and swear through the first couple of kilometres. And after completing six, I’m in a better frame of mind and ready to take another look at the problem.
I’m no network engineer, but I know enough to be dangerous. I open the laptop, login to the router and notice that some diagnostic checks are failing at what looks to be the DNS level. So I find another configuration panel that tells me which DNS addresses are being used.
I ping one of them, and it’s not looking good
--- 217.169.20.21 ping statistics ---
22 packets transmitted
8 packets received
63.6% packet loss
Maybe there’s an issue with that DNS server? Maybe I should use Google’s one … what is it? 4.4.8.8 or something like that. So I ping that to see if it’s different. And it’s not. Damn.
I scratch my head, and decide that maybe it’s worth calling my provider, Andrews & Arnold.
They answer within a few rings. (They always do, it’s wonderfully refreshing.) I give them my postcode, and they tell me there’s a big City Fibre outage. They also explain they have a status page up, and any updates will be posted there.
Now I feel stupid for getting so frustrated about it. Nothing I could’ve done would’ve enabled me to doom scroll this morning. And I feel doubly stupid for wanting to do that in the first place.
The status page itself is absolutely excellent. No corporate bullshit (except for the stuff they have to quote from CityFibre). Instead we get clear data about what they’re observing.
There’s a hastily put together graphic of areas that are “OK” and “NO OK” – which is really quite lovely in its get-the-job-done-rawness.
There’s charts I don’t fully understand, but definitely correlate with something going horribly wrong between 2 and 3am.
And then there’s this comment:
MANY of our CityFibre circuits are showing 140ms Latency and around 60% packet loss.
Hang on – that’s exactly what I was observing in my ping! 63.6% packet loss.
Data is matching up. What I am observing correlates with what these clever folks are observing. And I feel a renewed sense of calm.
The calmness comes from a certainty that there’s nothing more I can do. I decide to have a shower and potter around the garden until somebody somewhere fixes the problem.
Of course, by the time I’ve had a shower that certain someone has fixed the problem. No gardening today, then.
*
In Rory Sutherland’s book Alchemy, he describes the brilliance of Uber’s map.
it does not reduce the waiting time for a taxi but simply makes waiting 90% less frustrating
In other words, the quantity of the waiting is the same, but the quality of the waiting is superior.
The same is true of an Andrews & Arnold status page.
All ISPs that use the underlying CityFibre network likely experienced the same quantity of downtime.
But my downtime was, eventually, superior.