Saturday, December 29, 2018

Our 26-hour CenturyLink internet outage





















When I sat down at my iMac early on the morning of December 27th our internet service was down. This happens a few times each year. Usually just unplugging and replugging our CenturyLink modem restores it in a few minutes. Not this time. I tried calling their tech service, got put on hold and then hung up on.

It turned out things were way more serious than usual. Service wasn’t restored for 26 hours. No research or blog post for that day. Our local TV evening news mentioned that the problem was more than statewide. An Idaho Statesman article was titled Widespread CenturyLink outage shuts down phone services at Idaho prisons, education dept. An Idaho Press article was titled Nationwide internet outage affects CenturyLink customers. A USA Today article was titled CenturyLink outage knocks out 911 calls, hospital’s patient records.

The big side effect of losing the internet was losing our feed for watching Netflix. Elaine and I went back to reading books from our local public library. I had watched the first half hour of Springsteen on Broadway (see YouTube trailer) and was looking forward to seeing the other two hours.

The vintage test pattern image came from Wikimedia Commons.

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