Second extended outage in a month

[wrakocy]

So, I'm finally back online this evening following a roughly 5 hour outage (I'm in the Central Richmond in San Francisco) during which I was unable to work. This on the heels of last month's 8+ hour outage. Would anyone on Sonic's end care to comment on why not one single update or explanation was posted on sonicstatus.com?

[zep127]

I too am a customer in the Richmond District frustrated by the the second long outage in about 30 days. When service came back I called support and spoke with a rather bored sounding person who didn't offer any explanation. Is this going to be an issue going forward?

[wrakocy]

I called support and spoke with a rather bored sounding person who didn't offer any explanation.

Same general experience here, only difference being is that I called during the outage, and the bored technician on the other end could only muster: "Should be fixed by tonight" (ie, by midnight? by sunrise next day??...he didn't know) and was completely uninterested in the fact that updates were not being posted to sonicstatus.com. Really disappointing from a company that continues to justify its prices (which are directly on par with Comcast's) by claiming superior and more personal customer service.

Can't believe I'm saying this, but I'm inches away from switching back to Comcast when my contract expires. Their service is slower, their customer service is *awful*, but down times were lower and prices were the same.

[jacob.karinen]

I'm sorry about the outage last night. It was due to an issue at the LCP (Local Convergence Point) where we think some damage may have occurred to the fiber lines earlier that day. The outage only impacted a handful of users and that is why a message of the day wasn't posted or sonicstatus.com wasn't updated. Because of how wide the net is cast with our MOTDs and sonicstatus we don't post unless it's a large outage impacting a lot of users. Unfortunately, our front-end support reps weren't aware of what had caused the outage at the time, what the timeline for repair is, or what repairs were done to fix it until much later that night. I apologize for the fact that our rep sounded disinterested and I'll look into what happened.

[dane]

With an optical network, we know if every ONT (the customer premise fiber optic device) is up or down, so there are some things in the discussion stages here that will allow us to be much more proactive, and to keep our team better informed about issues. So, for example, if an OLT (the central office side) port were down, or a fiber or fibers were broken, all customers on the segment would be offline, and we could detect, dispatch, and even notify all the customers via text, "we've noticed that you and 28 other customers in your area just dropped offline, and we are investigating and will repair, no action is needed, and we'll let you know when the situation changes", and notify staff in our support dashboard, "customer is affected by area outage, 29 total users offline, repair en-route, etc".

Lots of opportunities for improvement here!

[wrakocy]

All sounds great, and I really do appreciate the replies. That said, in my opinion, the status site is there for a reason and should really be utilized, regardless of the breadth of the outage.

Something as simple as, "We are experiencing a minor outage in the SF Richmond. Techs are en route."....would have saved me a phone call, and would have saved time for the tech on the other end.

From a customer standpoint, the net result of no status update and a tech forced to respond to questions for which he has no answer is: apathy. Not good, but glad to hear you guys are working on it.

[Sonic guest]

The outage only impacted a handful of users and that is why a message of the day wasn't posted or sonicstatus.com wasn't updated. Because of how wide the net is cast with our MOTDs and sonicstatus we don't post unless it's a large outage impacting a lot of users.

I would have to disagree with this policy. If there is an outage, it should be posted to the status page. My parents have a cell but they don't text. If there is an outage, they would contact me and the first thing I would do is check the status page followed with calling support, if necessary. While a "handful" doesn't look like much from your perspective, impacted customers won't feel the same.

Please reconsider.

[amayfield]

I agree that Sonic should be informing folks when we are experiencing a Fiber outage. We do have a system in place to notify affected users about outages via SMS and email, however it was not utilized for this particular instance. We are looking into why that is so we can avoid this kind of situation in the future.

Regarding sonicstatus.com - in an effort to avoid misleading folks we do not notify about outages there unless it is widespread. In the case of this most recent outage - it affected 30 users in the Richmond district of San Francisco. If we were to post that we were experiencing a Fiber outage in the Richmond that suggests thousands of customers could be affected (as we have a fair number of users in the Richmond). If we were to specify that we were experiencing an outage on X ave in the Richmond that could suggest hundreds of customers are affected.

I appreciate your concerns and think they're justified and we will endeavor to do better in the future.

[wrakocy]

In the case of this most recent outage - it affected 30 users in the Richmond district of San Francisco. If we were to post that we were experiencing a Fiber outage in the Richmond that suggests thousands of customers could be affected (as we have a fair number of users in the Richmond). If we were to specify that we were experiencing an outage on X ave in the Richmond that could suggest hundreds of customers are affected.

But why not just post "We are experiencing a minor outage in the Richmond affecting 30 users"?? Folks with uninterrupted service are quite unlikely to be checking the status page, while the unlucky 30 would receive needed clarification without having to phone in. I agree that text messages would be wonderful. Just not understanding why you wouldn't do both, or at least utilize the status page while the texting solution is under development.

[dane]

In the case of this most recent outage - it affected 30 users in the Richmond district of San Francisco. If we were to post that we were experiencing a Fiber outage in the Richmond that suggests thousands of customers could be affected (as we have a fair number of users in the Richmond). If we were to specify that we were experiencing an outage on X ave in the Richmond that could suggest hundreds of customers are affected.

But why not just post "We are experiencing a minor outage in the Richmond affecting 30 users"?? Folks with uninterrupted service are quite unlikely to be checking the status page, while the unlucky 30 would receive needed clarification without having to phone in. I agree that text messages would be wonderful. Just not understanding why you wouldn't do both, or at least utilize the status page while the texting solution is under development.

We want to be cautious about alerting on everything, as some members get the status reports via text, email, twitter, etc.