Discussing, or not discussing, major business outages

George Herbert gherbert at crl.com
Sun Feb 7 07:06:52 UTC 1999


I am not going to name names, but I have it on good
authority that late this week a large hosting provider
went out of business abruptly.  So far, the news that
it did so has not been discussed anywhere, that I can
tell, which is starting to disturb me.  There have been
some significant dislocations related to this shutdown,
obviously, and this sort of event seems to me to be
something that involved parties should be at least
sending warnings out on nanog or other appropriate
discussion lists.

I and a third party ISP executive discussed this lack of
discussion some yesterday; their opinion is that businesses
and ISPs formerly hosted at the now defunct site are loath
to admit their connecitvity is down lest their customers
defect en masse causing a snowball of business failures,
when they will be up and stable via new providers shortly
and are not themselves fundamentally unsound.  I understand
that logic but cannot entirely agree with it.

I would like to see the issue discussed in general terms
at least; what is appropriate for notifications, what are
fair responsibilities to customers, the public, other ISPs etc.
in terms of this sort of event.


-george william herbert
gherbert at crl.com    I am not employed by, and do not speak for, CRL.




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