Here’s the latest exciting chapter in our T1 saga. At about 11am today, the loop abruptly seemed to go down. We called Verio, who hadn’t noticed the problem yet. Verio discovered that quite a few of their T1 customers had gone down at the same time as us, all of them using Worldcom local loops. Verio called Worldcom, who also hadn’t noticed the problem yet. Worldcom discovered an entire OC 48 interconnecting MCI/Worldcom and Southwestern Bell was dead.

At this point Worldcom claimed there was a SWB fiber cut. I called SWB directly and they didn’t know of any fiber cuts. About an hour later, Worldcom claimed SWB had dispatched a truck to repair the fiber but SWB still claimed they didn’t know about any fiber cuts.

After another hour of conflicting non-explanations of the problem, I had to get out of the office for a while. I went to Great Outdoors, had a #12, and sat outside in the Sun listening to CCR until my brain clouds went away. Finally, around 3pm we inexplicably came back up again. With Worldcom and SWB involved, we’ll probably never know what really happened but it seems very unlikely they could have located and repaired a cut OC 48 that quickly.