Connectivity issues from US / Canada

[Sami]

It has come to our attention that there are connection problems between some users in USA and Canada and our servers. This has been visible with inability to access our servers or very slow response times or pages not loading propely occasionally.

After some investigation the cause is found in the global connections, or routing in other words, between the two continents (our servers are in Europe). The problem is not in our end, and there's nothing we can do about it presently unfortunately.

In detail the problems are in Cogent Co's servers / connections that relay the traffic between places and countries, and problems are especially visible to traffic from East/North US/Canada to West/North Europe, but other North American regions may be affected too. According to information found the problem has been identified and the good fellows at that mentioned company are fixing the issues but until that there may be up to 50% packet loss meaning quite bad connections to some areas of Europe.

So hopefully connections to EU area will be normal again tomorrow.

[MattDell]

Works great from Hawaii, sami!

[ICEcoldair881]

Works great from Hawaii, sami!

hence why he said east USA. don't worry though. there are exceptions. I'm in Toronto, Canada and mine works fine.

ICEcold

[Jupiter]

hence why he said east USA. don't worry though. there are exceptions. I'm in Toronto, Canada and mine works fine.

ICEcold

bah. I'm in Toronto and mine fails badly. But my iPhone works fine...

Clearly what I've learned from this is I have no idea how the internet works.

[schro]

I'm in NC with no issues

[wtdawg]

O-H-I-O

Had problems most of the day, but much better now.  Appears to be running close to normal for me.

[Sigma]

I've been experiencing the problems since about 6pm on Sunday evening and it's not gotten any better, hasn't changed appreciably depending where I've tried in the Central US either.

In the past 36 hours or so it's been occurring, I've tried connecting in areas around Omaha, Lincoln, Kansas City, Fort Worth, Las Vegas, and Denver.  Las Vegas was normal, all the other locations have been horrible with pages usually taking several attempts to load if they load at all.

[mideg]

Maybe this helps in the understanding of the problem: the internet should be connected to location and ISP, hence the differences for some users between desktop PC and smartphone.

[Maarten Otto]

II've tried in  Omaha, Lincoln, Kansas City, Fort Worth, Las Vegas, and Denver. 

You got a teleporting machine or flying powder or what 

[mikk_13]

i know this may sound stupid and might not work, but try and turn your internet router off then back on. Every time you do this you get a new IP adress from your provider. I find sometimes i have problems like this, and i just reset the router and it seems to go fine after. You never know. Especially if the provider has changed some settings etc. A fresh connection might do the trick.

Also, delete all your internet browsing history, cookies, etc etc.

[Sami]

Cookies, caches etc. are irrelevant. As the problem is between routing from us to you and not in the content our server has sent.

Also I doubt that the IP reset will help either because it is the routing that your ISP uses and they do go via the same companies usually. It all depends on the ISP and what routings they use, as pointed out before that while one user from Toronto has major problems and the other does not, they have a different ISP and thus use different routing.

[ICEcoldair881]

bah. I'm in Toronto and mine fails badly. But my iPhone works fine...

what part. Etobicoke right here and mine's fine.

[swiftus27]

O-H-I-O

Had problems most of the day, but much better now.  Appears to be running close to normal for me.

Where in Ohio?  I've had NO problems all day.

[newboyonhere]

I live in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan and both computers I work on have issues.  Yesterday page loading was very slow if the page would load at all.  Today page loading is better but the page isn't updated.  My bank balance just came up as February 8, 1988, I think, but then I go to manage routes and it gives me a date of early January.  A leased plane that was suppose to be delivered to me on January 17th is still sitting in aircraft on order screen.

comments Sami??

[Sami]

The problems are not at our end, as you can read from the first post. You are probably seeing partly loaded pages, old data, or anything between because those Cogent guys cannot seem to be able to fix their cables...

Some status updates here: http://status.slicehost.com/2010/5/4/cogent-network-issues
(not our host, but has best up-to-date information.. Cogent's own "network status" page or any other news do not say a word of their problems)


Checked your airline too - nothing unusual there, all planes delivered, routes flying normally, and $2.5mil cash. (nothing needing immediate attention)

[Sami]

Actually Cogent's status page was now updated and they finally have acknowledged their connection problems: http://status.cogentco.com/

Some tech-savvy users with problems accessing our site could follow the instructions and email them some debug data and information that they cannot reach this site properly.

That page also has a possible fix for the issue, but not sure if it works?

Any customer who desires an immediate fix to this issue can use the Cogent DNS servers (66.28.0.45 and 66.28.0.61) once added close your browser and retry.

But just to make it clear so that there are no misunderstandings, sort of disclaimer: None of the companies having problems are no way related to us directly. This "Cogent" is some US hosting/routing company that has large cables around countries and cross the Atlantic too I believe, and their routing systems have been failing here (as posted in first post in this thread). So it's out of our control, and affects many other areas and websites too than just ours.

[newboyonhere]

Thanks for the info Sami.  I haven't read any others having the problem I'm having so I thought I would give it a shot.  Also Thanks Sami for developing a great game I think I have also caught on to some strategies of game play.

[newboyonhere]

Sami, just to let you know all things are working again.

[Sami]

I just emailed Cogent too since this partly occurring outage was getting too long, nearly 48h already.. They either fixed the whole issue (probable) or read my email (...not probable)

[ucfknightryan]

It's kind of amazing that a Tier 1 ISP had a problem go on that long.
That had to cost them a not so small fortune...