So the issue with routing between BT and above.net made The Register, and finally got a mention on the BT Status page. Lo and behold, this evening, everything seems a lot better.
If only BT had taken the issue seriously on Friday, or maybe, you know, perhaps have even detected it on their own network with their own monitoring, and resolved it themselves, they would have had a bunch of people feeling much happier.
So the network routing between BT and Above.net has been broken since Friday. The problem only really manifests at around 7pm when packet loss through that route climbs to unacceptable levels (like 80%+). It varies all the way through to about midnight by which time it’s down to 1-10% loss and services are usable.
It’s affecting access to Twitter, EA games, Eve Online and anything else which goes via that route. Access to other web services are entirely unaffected. To anyone who knows how to use traceroute it’s obvious where the problem lies.
Yet it’s been impossible to get BT to accept there is an issue or demonstrate they’re really investigating. The @BTCare account on Twitter tells us they are, but no evidence. The status page says something about ‘upgrades to the network’ but that only showed up at 8pm last night. My fault report last night has been marked as ‘cleared’ probably because the problem went away, as normal, at around midnight.
Come on BT, take some notice – do something. These two threads show the extent of the problem,
There’s plenty of traceroutes in them showing the issue between BT and Above.net – speak to each other, work it out, fix it permanently. Everyone in those threads is fully expecting the issue to come back tonight.