We will be bringing up additional routing between our London sites and Maidenhead. This is a period of 'at risk' as routing to services in Maidenhead (VoIP, Control pages, colocation) may be affected for brief moments whilst the work is being carried out.
Starting: Wednesday 10th December, 3AM
Ending by: Wednesday 10th December, 5AM
We're adjusting some of our internal routing between Maidenhead and London, this is general maintenance and is a period of 'at risk' whilst we do the work as there may be moments when our internal traffic involving maidenhead is routed over different links.
Starting: Wednesday 3rd December, 3AM
Ending by: Wednesday 3rd December, 5AM
We've had some problems today with Apple related traffic causing some of our routers to get busy. This has affected some customers with some latency and packetloss to some destinations on the Internet. The problem is that the recent software updates from Apple are being downloaded via our 'transit' links instead of our 'peering' links.
The bulk of our traffic comes to us over our peering links where we have higher capacity connections in to exchange points such as LINX and LONAP. However, even though we have direct peering with Apple of these higher capacity links, today's Apple traffic is being set over our smaller transit links.
We have tried to balance the traffic across the transit links we have, but this hasn't been perfect. We've emailed Apple, requesting that they send traffic to us over the peering links but we've only had an automatic ticket confirmation reply so far.
Traffic levels Friday evening were the highest we've ever seen, however the traffic was spread over multiple routers and were at levels that didn't impact our service negatively. We've had no word back from Apple about them using our peering links. We'll be looking at upgrading our transit capacity as a result of this so as to be able to cope better in the future.
We also understand that there was various reports in the media about Apple having problems yesterday and there were widely reported problems with update downloads failing. We're not sure is this is related to the reasons why Apple traffic was being set via transit instead of our direct peering with Apple though.
2020-11-18 Further update: We're in positive discussions with Apple in regard to improving the connectivity between our networks.