At 9:50 AM this morning one of our Metropolitan Ethernet providers, OnFiber had an equipment failure here in Seattle. We connect to one of our network peers, NTT/America at The Westin Building via this circuit. This caused us to have have intermittent connectivity over that particular circuit to NTT/America. Some digital.forest clients may have had "slow" or "intermittent" issues reaching servers here for a short period of time while we diagnosed the issue with the NOC's of NTT & OnFiber

We have shut down our BGP connection to NTT/America while OnFiber fixes the problems on their network. At the moment we are running on two of our three network connections. We will update this post when we bring the third circuit back online.

Update: As of 11:02 AM PDT this issue is completely resolved. The OnFiber circuit was manually moved to a different port. After a successful 10-minute testing of the new circuit we turned up our BGP session with NTT/America.

We maintained connectivity to our other BGP network peers through this event, so at no time was our network "down". We do like to keep our clients informed of events here at our datacenter, even if they have no direct impact on your servers. In this case, it was a classic example of Internet Architecture and how it handles outages. The often-used phrase is that it "routes around damage." In this instance when one of our circuits had an issue our traffic just shifted to our other circuits. It is likely that none of our clients even noticed. If they did notice it would have been an intermittent connectivity for a brief period of time. Such is the nature and reason for designing redundant systems. Our fiber optic connectivity to the rest of the Internet flows over multiple physical paths. Those paths do not converge until they are physically inside our datacenter facility. This prevents complete outages through equipment failure or accidental fiber cut. Today's event confirms the built-in redundancies work as designed.

--Chuck Goolsbee
VP Technical Operations
digital.forest, Inc.