Orange Broadband Outage

I arrived home from work on Friday night to be told by Novelist Supermum that our Internet Connection was not working.

Checked it out and discovered that web browsers weren't loading pages, email was hanging and I could only barely connect to an ftp site - which timed out fairly quickly.

Our PC's (1 Windows and 1 Mac) were connecting OK to our wireless router and the router was connected to the internet.

Pinging a few servers that I often connect to showed me that 50 to 75% of requests were timing out. Looked suspiciously like a network or line problem to me.

Decided to wait until morning, then try again.

Same problem again in the morning so I called Orange Customer Support at 09:45

I got the sort feeling that you get when you hear an alarm clock ringing in the middle of the day - i.e. slight depression on hearing a familiar sound - when I heard an Indian accent on the other end of the phone. I usually find that the language and cultural differences when dealing with Indian Call Centre staff require great patience, and cause a good deal of frustration.

The chap at the other end was very helpful. As I expected he ran me through power cycling the router, resetting the router, checking the configuration, checking the wires, plugging in directly to the network, rather than the wireless connection - all of which I had tried the night before. I stuck with him and tried again.

Finally at 10:15 he came to the conclusion that this was due to a possible network or line problem. He said that he was requesting a line check, which would take about 2 hours. He stressed that I shouldn't call again, and that they would update me by text message with the result of the line check.

Waited for about 4 hours, and no text message. Went to pick the kids up from their Grandmas. Half an hour later at 16:00 a text message comes through saying "Hello, we tried to call you about the fault you registered but couldn't get hold of you. Please call technical support or we'll have to close the fault. Thanks.".

I sent a text back explaining that I was out and didn't have their contact number. I told them that I'd be back in a couple of hours, and asked them to give me time to return home, or text me their phone number.

I got back home and called them again about 17:45. A different Indian chap on the other end again. This one told me that the line check had been done and shown that the line was OK. He made me jump through hoops with the checking and configuration. After half an hour of this he paused for a moment (I think somebody may have been whispering in his ear). He announced that the cause was on Orange server which was down for "maintenance" at 16:30. We both cheered at this point - Hooray!).

He couldn't tell me when the "maintenance" was due to finish. (Bollocks! thinks I. This is not maintenance, this is Fix on Fail!)

I had a minor rant at him, as to why wasn't the network status checked, before he embarked on a reconfiguration of the default settings on my PC. I told him that I expected to be re-imbursed with the price of the second phone call.

He advised me to wait 24 hours before checking the connection. Being impatient I checked at 21:00 and discovered that we were back on line.