I know C&W are completely useless but Egg should have been prepared! A C&W link has gone down, but i cant help but think that Egg could have avoided this by purchasing another link from a different provider in case of emergencies (like this) especially because its Clueless & Witless (Cable & Wireless) who are providing them with connectivity and they have a habit of being well crap.

Ahh well you know what they say, dont put all your eggs in one basket, sorry folks couldnt resist.

With this one they're telling the truth. C&W have experiecned big problems in Germany since about 12:00 yesterday which has had a knock on effect in this country.

Customers that use C&W for communications, including business broadband and e-mail, have also suffered. C&W finally managed to restore service at about 12:30 today.

No backup system eh? Maybe they shouldn't have put all their eggs in one basket ?

I'll get my coat...

This is what happens when companies host their systems in-house. They look at all the failsafes on everything that they run, putting redundancy into everything. Then they ignore the fact that they have got a single bit of cable/fibre connecting them to the outside world.

What's shocking as well is that they haven't even bothered to redirect their address to a static holding page...

So, you're one of the largest on-line financial institutions in the UK and you put all your comms through a single (ISP) point of failure? Something doesn't sound quite right!

No?

It's interesting to note that it appears Egg's DR plan does not have a second web farm sitting on another ISPs backbone, with the associated redundant links to the back office.

Now their primary ISP has fallen off the wall, the redundant links to that primary ISP don't make a bit of difference when the problem is upstream. I hope they can put it all back together again.

It's all hosted servers from C&W, pendragon, pinewood/pinnacle, and any other sites all appear to have been affected.

Not much use for those providing cms and dealer portals hahahahaahhahahahahahahahaha

Looks like it isn't just the server not responding.

WHOIS failed to respond several times on internic and nslookup times out, appears that it could be a DNS issues or ... dare I say it... a domain name renewal issue!!

Great, C&W are really making my day at the moment...

I get back from holiday to find a letter from C&W telling me they're cutting my Bulldog broadband off in 30 days as they no longer deal with residential customers. Except they decided to cut it off early. How nice. Now BT want to charge me 125 quid to reconnect the line that I never asked to be cut off in the first place. Probably not much of a chance of getting that money back from C&W...

So, I decided to complete more of my post-holiday chores. Including paying my credit card bill via Egg. Except I can't do that now either. And apparently all thanks to C&W again. Have they got some sort of vendetta against me? No doubt if I get a late payment penalty I'll have the same chance of it being reimbursed by C&W as my phone line reconnection!

Useless b'stards.

... a bit of egg-on-the-face time, I presume...

I've a feeling this is affecting en.wikipedia.org too...

As C&W just loves to make redundancy after redundancy, (and as an ex C&W employee who was made redundant I should know,) Im not surprised they've not received a response from C&W. There's probably no one left in Bracknell and Hammersmith the fix the problem.

It is NOT C&W's fault. It is Egg's fault for using an infrastructure that can be brought down by a single supplier's failure.

So, why don't they have a second connection with a different provider?

Egg has been appallingly unreliable all year. There have been numerous outages and their secure messaging system fails 7 times out of 10. It's a joke.

Unfortunately this is going to become an increasing problem. These companies have not designed their systems with expansion and DR in mind. They are starting to creak under the load. I've had availability agro with all my online account providers. Internet banking is rapidly turning into a farce.

So, those 'who shouted loud enough' are reconnected - but Egg is still down.

Methinks I'll be changing credit cards.

...........wanting to get my hands on my money.

Where's the info for me?

So much for online banking - better get the cheque book out!

Doesn't surprise me that they had no backup strategy.

Their site uses MSIE only - and when I asked when they were implementing a Firefox-friendly site, they said they had no plans to do so - I had to use MSIE.

......or did they say "You've got to be Yolking" ??!!

Sorry !

It would seem it is back up and running again, although for how long I don't know...!

Egg's website works just fine with Opera and has done for years, maybe you should try that if you want an alternative to IE?

...the TomTom support / Plus site has been down for almost exactly the same period - wonder if they also use C&W?

> Their site uses MSIE only[..]

Dunno what version of Firefox, Opera, Safari or Lynx you're using, but I've just tested logging in and viewing my credit card statement on all four successfully.

Unless you're talking about their Money Manager which is produced by a different company (eWIse) in which case you should be complaining about them using an ActiveX...

Send C&W an invoice for 30 days' service, reconnection fees, and lost productivity. Then start calling and demanding payment. Unless you did your payment by credit card, in which case I'd claim it back as unlawful payment.

:-)

Umm why isn't there server hosted at my then one physical site with at least three different companies providing a connection ??

PJH

Thanks for the info. Yes it is Money Manager that was the problem.

Funny how Egg didn't tell me that it wasn't their product !

Using Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.6 by the way.

As an employee of Pinewood / Pendragon ... We have suffered no problems on client sites for the duration of the week. Infact its been rock solid and as responsive as ever.

One has to ask if "The Avangelist" works for an alternative provider of Dealer Management Systems and is after a quick play on the C&W outage to further their opportunities by bashing Hosted services in favour of a local server where frequently even though backups are provided the site staff just leave them on top of the server.

Quote :-

Not just Egg

By The Avangelist

Posted Thursday 23rd August 2007 13:17 GMT

It's all hosted servers from C&W, pendragon, pinewood/pinnacle, and any other sites all appear to have been affected.

Not much use for those providing cms and dealer portals hahahahaahhahahahahahahahaha

Egg have had problems with the website for weeks with performance issues and inability to login - so much so that they've finally admitted it and refunded the late payment charges on my account which only arrived because they failed to process my payment as I couldn't login (after arguing the toss and telling me I should have phoned them).

Yeah sure, but you keep telling me you're online, to use your online service and I expect to be able to do so - especially when a fault persists for weeks I expect not to be charged...

Something's cracked. A bit llke the humor at Vulture Central.

When I went for an interview there and I was talking about the need for contingency planning, importance of testing, well defined specifications etc. I could see from their faces I was saying the wrong thing as far as they were concerned - not coming over as young and trendy (as I wouldn't at 40+ and with more years IT industry experience than I care to remember).

So, I was totally unsurprised to find they have fallen to a classic single point of failure scenario.

"Looks like it isn't just the server not responding.

WHOIS failed to respond several times on internic and nslookup times out, appears that it could be a DNS issues or ... dare I say it... a domain name renewal issue!!"

Can anyone verify if this is the case? I ask because I really doubt egg.com would rely on one ISP. I ask secondly because C&W has deleted OUR domain name registration on 2 occasions without warning, bringing us down for nearly a day each time.

It's back up now, and not a word of explanation or apology on the homepage for the problems their incompetence has caused their customers for the past two days.

I find that attitude even more deplorable than their lack of technical competence.

I use my phone as a 3G modem and DNS and networking on T-Mobile's network have been very cranky since yesterday afternoon. I can make a connection successfully but it would take a couple of goes to get one that DNS worked with. I wonder if parts of T-Mobile's infrastructure are still in CW's network.