NY Issue Causes Internet Problem [Resolved]

October 31, 2012

[Updated: Issue resolved] An issue with routers in New York has temporarily knocked the Transact internet service offline this evening, and the Company said that engineers are working to resolve the issue.

A statement from the Company said: “Transact internet service is currently offline due to power supply interruptions affecting our routers in New York caused by Hurricane Sandy. Engineers have been on site for some time now and are working to resolve asap. Updates to follow. We are very sorry for any inconvenience this may be causing and thank our customers for their patience.”

As Hurricane Sandy barreled towards the East Coast, concern had been expressed that the storm may affect data centers, and could potentially spark outages that would have a widespread effect. Two days after Hurricane Sandy hit, power and communications outages are continuing to be a concern in some parts of the East Coast.

Verizon posted a photo online today showing their lobby in Manhattan completely flooded, while Computer World reports that the outages have affected all four major wireless carriers — Verizon Wireless, AT&T, Sprint & T-Mobile — to the point people in New York have been seen lining up at payphones to make calls.

Update #1: The problem was resolved by approximately 1.30am.

Update #2: An email sent out to customers follows below

Dear Valued Transact Customer:

We greatly value your business and therefore wish you to provide you with a report on the service interruption that occurred last night in addition to our plans to best prevent this from occurring in the future.

Our data centre in Manhattan, New York experienced power loss due to a facilities generator fault from 7:22pm on October 31 through to 1:09am November 1st. The data centre had been running on reserve power supply since Monday, October 28th due to Hurricane Sandy disabling the main electrical feed.

Engineers worked as quickly as possible to restore power and the generators serving our data centre are back up and running. Main power restoration to the data centre is in progress after the devastation of hurricane Sandy. Migration off generator power will occur at that time.

Transact are in the process of migrating equipment into a new facility in New York in addition to a new Miami location in order to help decrease the potential of similar issues occurring in the future.

We greatly appreciate your patience and understanding and once again thank you for choosing Transact as your internet service provider.

Sincerely,

Transact and Digicel Management Team

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Comments (8)

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  1. mixitup says:

    And I’m here pulling out plugs re-booting, tryna steal my neighbour signal. Let’s get it together Transact!

  2. George says:

    A text to all customers informing them of the outage and a progress report would have been nice. Digicel have the capabilty as evidenced by the annoying “500″ promotional messages. I too was pulling wires and rebooting my system.

  3. george courtney says:

    at least they’ve given us a 411 on this situation and not let us with guessing games

  4. Vote for Me says:

    Accidents happen but next time Transact should provide extensive notification of the outage on the news. I spent some time trying to trouble shoot last night with modems, routers, cables etc.

    Thankfully everything was back on line early this morning.

    • Sad Truth says:

      Agreed, really bad customer notification. I figured out after a bit of troubleshooting that it was their routing off island that was the issue, but could still get to their mail servers on island and check mail through the web interface. Would it have been so difficult to post a message on their website or send out emails for those who could receive them? Also, why not post a prerecorded message on their phone help line similar to what Belco does during high call volume outages.

  5. wizeazz says:

    Very poor customer service.This issue started 2 days ago and we customers have to find out about the issue on Bernews.I tried for 3 hours to reach Transact(Digicel) customer service only to be on hold for 20 minutes then cut off.None of the other internet suppliers had problems.

  6. Cafe World Addict says:

    I was pulling cords, resetting and all too. sent note to myself to call cablevision because thought it was there poor service again! O well glad i had my neighbours password so jumped on his internet and was able to serve all my cafe food.