Forced Network Changes

This afternoon, one of our bandwidth contractors, who provides us with a number of connections, terminated our links with them, a breach of their contract with us, due to a minor contract dispute. We had not been given proper notice of this termination, and as this termination was in a breach of our contract with them relations will not be continued with this reseller.

The network failed-over properly during the event, but as we were not properly notified we had not been able to gracefully take down the BGP sessions, which did cause issues over various routes as the new routes were propagating. There should have been no complete outage of any kind. We do apologize for any issues experienced during this event. In addition, I can say for certain that we had tried our best to resolve this conflict with the contractor, but the contractor had been uncooperative and unwilling to follow the terms of their own contract, which has been shown by the improper termination of our circuits. As we have selected the contractor we chose to do business with, we accept all responsibility for issues experienced by our customers and are working to reduce the amount of connectivity purchased through such resellers.

This sudden change is also serving as a catalyst for further network changes. We had been planning to combine the networks into a single network this month, but we are now scheduling this change to occur next Wednesday, the 6th. There should also be no concern over overall network performance/reliability, as we do have adequate network diversity and capacity to survive this issue, but will still be working on expanding our carriers and connectivity to compensate for this loss. We are hoping to have additional connectivity Level(3) and Comcast this month, the contracts are already in place. Further announcements regarding the network change and scheduled maintenance will be made when the full details are determined.