So far I've got a downed PVC to Toronto, and a total inability to call many numbers in the Toronto area (I get a reorder)...this appears to be a widepsread outage...has anyone heard anything? Started at 10:23 EDT. --msa
http://newsworld.cbc.ca/cgi-bin/templates/view.cgi?/news/1999/07/16/bell9907 16
-----Original Message----- From: owner-nanog@merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog@merit.edu]On Behalf Of Majdi Abbas Sent: Friday, July 16, 1999 10:23 AM To: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Canada Fiber Cut?
So far I've got a downed PVC to Toronto, and a total inability to call many numbers in the Toronto area (I get a reorder)...this appears to be a widepsread outage...has anyone heard anything?
Started at 10:23 EDT.
--msa
[ On Friday, July 16, 1999 at 12:22:42 (-0400), Majdi Abbas wrote: ]
Subject: Canada Fiber Cut?
So far I've got a downed PVC to Toronto, and a total inability to call many numbers in the Toronto area (I get a reorder)...this appears to be a widepsread outage...has anyone heard anything?
Started at 10:23 EDT.
Not a fibre cut -- an electrical explosion and subsequent fire in the Bell Canada Simcoe St. switch building in downtown Toronto cut power to the switch at about 7:30EDT or so. Shortly after the fire was squelched the batteries gave out and half of downtown Toronto lost all telephone and data service. One electrician has been sent to hospital suffering from smoke inhalation. The fire department reports it as a three-alarm fire. Supposedly it was on the fourth floor of the building and the fire went all the way up to the ninth floor before it was put out. I'm not sure how tall the building is in total -- perhaps 12 floors -- and it's all Bell Canada switching equipment. Everyone in downtown Toronto no doubt knows about it by now, but of course they can't tell anyone -- even the downtown cellular systems are either out-of-service because of dead land-lines, or are too overloaded by folks phoning their friends and families.... My ISP is located downtown, but they have dual-redunant connections to their North York datacentre, which happens to be where my ISDN line terminates so I'm still online! ;-) (though there was a short ISDN interruption as the Bell systems routed around the dead Simcoe switch) -- Greg A. Woods +1 416 218-0098 VE3TCP <gwoods@acm.org> <robohack!woods> Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>; Secrets of the Weird <woods@weird.com>
Toronto explosion and fire disrupt communications across Canada http://www.techserver.com/noframes/story/0,2294,71088-112342-798115-0,00.htm... Majdi Abbas wrote:
So far I've got a downed PVC to Toronto, and a total inability to call many numbers in the Toronto area (I get a reorder)...this appears to be a widepsread outage...has anyone heard anything?
Started at 10:23 EDT.
--msa
Toronto explosion and fire disrupt communications across Canada ^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Are you sure? Anyone notice anything down outside of the territory of Simcoe CO (the one that exploded)? I don't see why there would have been.. All our Toronto customers stayed up except those connected to that CO. BTW, it looks like at least some stuff is back up now, I can now call phones connected to Simcoe. -Phil
[ On Friday, July 16, 1999 at 16:16:20 (-0400), Phillip Vandry wrote: ]
Subject: Re: Canada Fiber Cut?
Are you sure? Anyone notice anything down outside of the territory of Simcoe CO (the one that exploded)? I don't see why there would have been.. All our Toronto customers stayed up except those connected to that CO.
I'm just puppeting what I hear on the news (though I did see the live press conference with the Bell guy when things got back to 50% alive), but: There was enough data service impacted that many Bank services, including ATMs across the Metro Toronto region, as well as as far away as downtown Ottawa were offline. There were also supposedly long distance services as far away as Asia affected. I'm still seeing numerous small domains as totally non-existant because they didn't have their DNS servers widely enough spread apart to avoid a little outage like this (of course putting both on the same network without your own redundant connection is just asking for trouble! ;-) www.bell.ca is also now back up (at least I couldn't get to it from my highly redundantly connected ISP), though there's as yet no press release in their online "newsroom"! ;-)
BTW, it looks like at least some stuff is back up now, I can now call phones connected to Simcoe.
It's supposedly mostly back up now -- though maybe not 100%. I suspect it's running on the AC mains again and hopefully nothing happens again before the batteries are fully re-charged again! ;-) -- Greg A. Woods +1 416 218-0098 VE3TCP <gwoods@acm.org> <robohack!woods> Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>; Secrets of the Weird <woods@weird.com>
I had customers from St. Catherines all the way to well out past oshawa affected. A lot of voice connections outside the downtown core were hit-and-miss, wherby after trying about 10 or so times, I could make the call. For the most part, things seemed to stable out at about 16:00 EDT. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Sameer Khosla | (416) 410-0286 Internetworking Systems Engineer | (888) 517-7286 ATM Canada | fax (416) 248-6201 skhosla@atmcanada.com | http://www.atmcanada.com =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= On Fri, 16 Jul 1999, Phillip Vandry wrote:
Toronto explosion and fire disrupt communications across Canada ^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Are you sure? Anyone notice anything down outside of the territory of Simcoe CO (the one that exploded)? I don't see why there would have been.. All our Toronto customers stayed up except those connected to that CO.
BTW, it looks like at least some stuff is back up now, I can now call phones connected to Simcoe.
-Phil
participants (6)
-
Henry R. Linneweh -
Majdi Abbas -
Mike Rae -
Phillip Vandry -
Sameer Khosla -
woods＠most.weird.com