I wonder how Cisco can continuously get away with major outages...
AT&T frame relay net goes down for the count
Carrier may be liable for huge SLA penalties.
By David Rohde and Sandra Gittlen
Network World Fusion, 4/14/98
AT&T's frame relay network has fallen and it can't seem to get back up.
As of 10 a.m. today more than 25% of AT&T's frame relay customers are still without service, according to a recording at AT&T's network operations center.
The outage began at 3 p.m. Monday and continued through the evening. The situation affected not only business-to-business data communications but also a wide swath of the consumer economy. Bank ATM
machines, travel agency orders and credit card transactions were disrupted.
Many customers reportedly switched to backup systems running over private lines, ISDN or other carriers' networks, alleviating some of the disruption.
Nevertheless, the outage may trigger big penalties in AT&T's frame relay service-level agreements (SLA). Frequently negotiated with individual customers, AT&T's frame relay SLAs went mainstream in
January as the carrier loaded them into its tariffs.
Under the new standard SLAs, AT&T guarantees to provide 99.99% availability of its frame relay network from service interface to service interface. The carrier also guarantees to restore lost permanent virtual circuits within four hours, or the customer gets the affected ports and PVCs free for a month.
An AT&T spokeswoman said the cause of the outage was still unclear. "But we are looking into the interaction of two of the frame relay switches," she said. The AT&T recording pointed to possible
problems in a Los Angeles switch. AT&T's frame relay network runs over StrataCom BPX switches from Cisco Systems, Inc., and the spokeswoman said "we are working closely with Cisco" to resolve the outage.
A problem in one switch can affect much of the network because PVCs are virtual circuits whose paths may vary depending on route utilization. The spokeswoman could not specify when total service would be restored.
A letter was on its way this morning to AT&T's 6,000 frame relay customers from Chairman and CEO C. Michael Armstrong apologizing for the outage and saying it was "unacceptable." Armstrong was due
to hold a briefing at noon to give more information, but that may not assuage everyone.
"I lost $4 million of revenue today due to [the] frame communication outage," said one user in a posting on Network World Fusion. "I understand that all AT&T InterSpan frame customers and the entire
AT&T internal administration were out of service. The outage was so devastating that I now have to reorder 50% of my carrier service and diversify into Sprint and MCI."
The user speculated that because "AT&T has segmented their net into three areas it might be architecture limitations which were violated during normal switch port installation."
Another user criticized AT&T's response to the problem, calling it "pathetic."
"This national outage by AT&T affected every single customer who relies on this service, causing countless problems behind the
scenes at major corporations as well as affecting consumers who were shopping," the user said. |
