Customers of Demon Internet's ADSL and leased line division
suffered a double failure as after-effects of the World Trade
Centre attack and Nimda virus combined to cause havoc.
Some users were without access for three days. Ian Hood, director
of communications for Thus, which owns Demon said: "A set of
unusual circumstances have combined to cause this problem."
Internet connections from Telehouse in New York, a major site for
transferring information across the Internet has been badly
affected by the attack on the World Trade Centre. This meant that
Demon, like other ISPs, had to look for other sources of bandwidth
to keep its services running.
"We needed to reconfigure our network to take into account the loss
of services at Telehouse," said Hood. "During this complex
procedure, something went wrong.
"Around the same time, the first wave of the Nimda virus hit and
although our infrastructure wasn't affected, our customers who were
infected by the virus started generating huge amounts of traffic
which flooded our servers and gateways." Hood added.
Hood dismissed reports that all of Demon's customers had been
affected but admitted that less than 10% may have intermittent
failure.
Several Demon customers claimed the ISP was unhelpful in responding
to queries. Hood responded: "We were getting calls from both users
infected by the virus who assumed that the problem was down to us.
This is not a situation that we could have predicted and we were
not able to answer every call as we normally would. We were
stretched but we fixed the problem as quickly as we could."
Hood believes that the Nimda virus affected other ISPs just as
severely.
"The situation is under control now and our customer helpdesk
service is running as normal. We will be meeting on Friday to look
at how we can better protect ourselves and our customers from this
kind of thing in the future," he added.
Cw360 readers confirmed that normal service had been resumed and
many had been able to contact Demon's helpdesk to gain more
information.