Service status - why no information?

[#1]

But also, it is no excuse.  The point is - will Plusnet recognise the issue and do something about it - like reinstate an effective "Service Status" notification/helpline/whatever?  After all, it does seem that they used to have this;  and the justification for scrapping it seems feeble and not credible.

You will have to ask their masters/owners (BT Consumer Division) about that - it is they who are making all the calls now, Plusnet are merely a brand in their portfolio.

[#2]

Well I noticed this today on the Service Information page, I do not recall seeing it before

It takes you to the page to report a fault

Edit: I would suggest the failure was down to BT infrastructure and not plusnet

[#3]

That has been there for a while

[#4]

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@Dan_the_Van wrote:

Well I noticed this today on the Service Information page, I do not recall seeing it before

It takes you to the page to report a fault

Edit: I would suggest the failure was down to BT infrastructure and not plusnet

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Good point,  @Dan_the_Van  - wonder if BT Broadband customers were also affected?

[#5]

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@jab1 wrote:

But also, it is no excuse.  The point is - will Plusnet recognise the issue and do something about it - like reinstate an effective "Service Status" notification/helpline/whatever?  After all, it does seem that they used to have this;  and the justification for scrapping it seems feeble and not credible.

You will have to ask their masters/owners (BT Consumer Division) about that - it is they who are making all the calls now, Plusnet are merely a brand in their portfolio.

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I'm not looking to quibble, @jab1 , but that line of thinking doesn't wash.  Plusnet may be owned by BT.  But Plusnet is a corporate entity, operates as such, and has to be accountable.  We, the customers, have contracts with Plusnet. 

Just because BT owns them does not absolve Plusnet from responsibility for the products it provides, the contracts it signs, and the services it delivers.

[#6]

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@Dan_the_Van wrote:

I would suggest the failure was down to BT infrastructure and not plusnet

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The recent failure was DNS - and they are Plusnet's DNS servers, not BT's.

It is possible they are virtual servers on BT racks, or Plusnet's hardware in a BT data centre, but it was just Plusnet customers using Plusnet DNS that had the issue.

Even if it was a BT failure, that wouldn't stop Plusnet being open about what the issue was - even if just to say it was BT's fault.

[#7]

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@br1anst0rm wrote:

I'll be interested to see whether a moderator or staff member responds to my post this time round.  But this line of "marketing-people" thinking (it's not logic!) is both perverse and counterproductive.  It leaves Plusnet looking incompetent, inert and ineffective.

From a moderator side of things, we are customers and can't post service status updates nor have access to any systems or special insight to issues.

[#8]

Thanks, @dvorak - I quite understand that moderators are customers and essentially oversee and manage forum discussion but cannot make decisions or implement action regarding Plusnet's operations.

This discussion (and others) about Plusnet's failure to provide timely and readily accessible service-status information is intended to be constructive:  to try to encourage and persuade Plusnet to address and respond to the genuine concerns of customers.

I was certainly not looking to moderators to provide answers or explanations regarding the recent outage.

My hope was that moderators on the forum would make a point of drawing to the attention of Plusnet staff, customer services, and decision makers, that there is an issue here (effective provision of service-status information) on which it is in Plusnet's own interests to take action.

Are you able to do that?

[#9]

It has been raised previously, and has been noted again.

[#10]

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@br1anst0rm wrote:

My hope was that moderators on the forum would make a point of drawing to the attention of Plusnet staff, customer services, and decision makers, that there is an issue here ...

Moderators probably don't have that access,  but the "Superusers" do !

"Superusers" can be identified by looking for their forum "name" appearing as bold red.

Having said that, I can't remember whether Plusnet policy has EVER been changed by customer demand, particularly on issues such as the withdrawal of being able to ask the support staff a question via the 'ticket' system, or why Plusnet still don't have IPv6 despite being one of the first ISPs to trial it more than a decade ago.

[#11]

Superusers don't have access to systems or service status either?
We all have the same level of access to staff and that's where this has been raised, by both groups.

[#12]

Agreed,  but I was going by this -

which looks to be a closer level of communication with the business than moderators appear to have

[#13]

@corringham 

Previously I worked for a Data provider in the City of London so I am fully aware how data centres are linked together, so the infrastructure I was referring to was the interconnection between data centres not the owners of the equipment in those data centres.

But I agree the Primary or Secondary DNS servers should not have appeared to go down, I was lucky I didn't have any issues.

[#14]

@Dan_the_Van 

"the infrastructure I was referring to was the interconnection between data centres not the owners of the equipment in those data centres."

yes I accept links can go down - that's one of the things routing tables are for.

However, the recent failure wasn't a loss of customer connectivity to the internet, it was the loss of access to functioning DNS. If an interconnect was to go down cutting access to the DNS, either a different route should be used to get to the DNS servers, or a different DNS should be accessed. Other Plusnet DNS systems were apparently working - just not the ones most customers routers were configured to use.

[#15]

It would make more sense if Plusnet had DNS servers in more than one physical data-centre, and then automatically assign each customer's router's 'primary' DNS to the nearest data-centre, and the 'secondary' DNS to the next nearest data-centre.

Currently it appears that the routers 'primary' and 'secondary' DNS are set to the same IP subnet, in the same location, so in the event of a localised server problem, the chances are that both DNS's are affected.