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Welcome to The Outages Wiki!
Outage or downtime refers to a period of time or a percentage of a timespan that a system is unavailable or offline. This is usually a result of the system failing to function because of an unplanned event, or because of routine maintenance.
Our primary focus tends to be Critical Internet Infrastructure such as IXPs, DNS root servers, major carriers, major data center, carrier hotel, COs, etc., related outages, but other sorts of things -- telecom/BlackBerry problems, AIM dying again, etc -- are certainly within our scope here as well. For years many have argued “what constitutes critical infrastructure”. A single clear cut definition has yet to be devised.
Infrastructure is constantly changing; a moving target, so to speak, and what's important to one may not be as important to others. You are welcome to adopt whatever definition of 'criticality' you like.
In general, if you take "why isn't X working?" calls from paying customers, anything they might ask about is on topic for the list, and this site.
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Mission Statement
The mission of the OUTAGES list is to have a central place to educate and share planned and unplanned global outages to achieve common consensus among private and government communities regarding awareness for the resiliency and stability of critical information infrastructure.
The OUTAGES list will pursue this mission in adherence to the following principles:
Collaboration - Cooperation & participation is one of the key things that we are aiming to achieve with a broad base of representation. Outages list is represented by the operator community for public interest.
Open process - Any interested person can participate in the work, make his or her voice heard. Part of this principle is our commitment to making network operator community aware regarding major service impacting due to outages. Our mailing lists is publicly available on wiki page.
Volunteer Core - Our participants and our leadership are people who come to the OUTAGES forum because they want to do work that furthers the OUTAGES mission of "making non-biased authoritative source for major outages reporting" for public interest.
Outage Resources
The primary resources available at the moment are our mailing lists, our Dashboard of links to status, diagnostic, and NOG websites, and a fanatical devotion to the Pope.
Mailing Lists
The primary goal of the mailing list ("outages") is for outages-reporting of observed failures of major critical internet infrastructure components having significant traffic-carrying capacity, similar to what FCC provided prior to 9/11 days, though they seem to have pulled back due to terrorism concerns. Some believe that LEC's and IXC's also like this model as they no longer have to air their dirty laundry. This mailing list, though, is not about making anyone look bad -- it's all about information sharing and keeping network operators & end users abreast on the situation with as close to real-time information as possible, in order to assess and respond to major outages, such as by routing voice/data via different carriers which may directly or indirectly impact us and our customers. A reliable communications network is essential in times of crisis.
The purpose of this list is to have a central place to lookup and report to so that end users & network operators know why their services (e-mail, phones, etc) went down -- eliminating the need to open tons of trouble tickets during a major event. One master ticket - such as "fiber cut affecting xxx OC48's in GA" would suffice. We hope that network service providers, carriers and network operators around the globe will see the benefit to posting such events so that everyone could benefit from it -- including themselves.
Collaboration and participation is one of the key things that we are aiming to achieve with a broad base of representation. Outages list is represented by the operator community.
Outages Mailing Lists
We operate 3 lists locally; they're Mailman lists, and you can click on these links to sign up:
Please subscribe the mailing list before sending a message to it, because only subscribers can be allowed to post messages on the list in the current configuration.
outages@outages.org - Warnings of planned outages and reports of observed current outages
outages-discussion@outages.org - Discussion about post outages (troubleshooting, analysis, post-mortem, etc).
outages-announce@outages.org - Change management and future updates related to the lists.
Currently the first two lists are unmoderated as we would like everyone to timely benefit from such reporting. The inclusion of 'commercial content' is assumed to be inappropriate, unless the group discussion develops a desire to hear about product features.
Acknowledgments
First, thanks must go to the companies and individuals for providing hardware, hosting space and their valuable time for outages.org
- PhoenixNAP for donating bandwidth and a dedicated server for wiki.outages.org
- PUCK for hosting the mailing list.
Many thanks to volunteers, network operators and the community as a whole for all their ongoing contributions.
