On July 20, 2007 I have experienced the Mass Outage with at least three vendors: XO Communications, Global-Com and AT&T. All our Chicago land area businesses were disconnected from each other (T1s) and Global-Com’s phone service was down but XO’s phone service seemed OK. I could not get a hold of either Global-Com or XO. I kept getting an "All circuits are busy message." The funny thing was that although sometimes our internal communications were working (VPNs) we still have no access to the Internet. At least two of my companies were always connected - one in Arlington Heights and another one in Des Plaines. I guess they were connected but isolated from the rest of the world.

Globalcom sent out a postmortem report on the network issue but they do not list the actual cause or name the faulting telecommunications carrier. XO and AT&T have remained silent about the issue.

The report read:

On Friday, July 20th, Globalcom’s network began experiencing periodic service disruptions. At approximately 2:00pm Friday, Globalcom isolated the majority of the issues to a third party carrier transport provider. This trading partner informed Globalcom that it was in the midst of a catastrophic outage at one of their Chicago central nodes.

From approximately 2:00 pm on Friday to 2:00 am on Saturday, Globalcom Operations worked with the third party carrier transport provider to isolate and resolve their service disruptions. These disruptions impacted Globalcom’s voice, data, and integrated customers to varying degrees, and may have disrupted service to your business location.

We regret that this incident has occurred and certainly understand the effect that this may have had on your business. We are proactively monitoring our network elements to maintain a stable and reliable environment and ensure your business is back on track.

Globalcom appreciates your patience and trusts you know we value your business. If you are still experiencing network anomalies, please contact Globalcom Customer Care at 1-800-589-1531.

Sincerely,
Eric Wince
Chief Operating Officer
Globalcom, Inc.

Tags: arlington heights, business location, carrier transport, central nodes, chicago land area, des plaines, funny thing, globalcom, internal communications, midst, network anomalies, network elements, party carrier, phone service, service disruptions, t1s, telecommunications carrier, transport provider, voice data, xo communications