My guess: Installation of the NSA’s intercepting routing equipment did not go as planned.
Cablevision’s customer communication about issues that lasted two, maybe three days is shown below.
The “today” listed in their email is actually yesterday. Notice that there is no account of what the trouble was. Symptoms were that some websites, but not all, for example Microsoft.com, were unreachable or extremely slow to download, while others, such as Google.com, performed without issue.
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Thanks, Richard. After several hours of troubleshooting these difficulties for my own shop, it wasn’t until 2 clients called in frustration that I realized it was a widespread local problem. Cablevision’s ongoing resistance to adopting anything like a 21st century approach to customer service continues to amaze. Unlike Time/Warner, Comcast and Charter, Optimum Online still has no “Service Status” web page or phone number that might allow customers to learn of widespread outage. Need more evidence? Go on to their website and log in with an Optimum ID. Next web page that comes up says “in order to protect your identity, we need you to log in with your password again.” So, you log in again. And the same web page comes up – “log in again.” At this point you realize you’re being punked – and click on any other link, and voila – you were logged in the whole time – they just forgot to say so. Optimum/Cablevision continues to earn the “Palm Slapped Against Forehead” award for customer service.
I waited on hold for 1 hour yesterday to speak to a tech at Cablevision. I thought it was my equipment that was not functioning. I think I knew more than he did. I had already determined that it was not a DNS issue as I had tested both OpenDNS and Google DNS servers without any fix. I was also able to determine this was only a Cablevision issue by remoting in to other computers I control that are on different ISPs and finding that I could open pages that would not open on machines on Cablevision in CT.
A bit later in the day I received a torrent of requests to come fix peoples’ systems. I already knew there was nothing I or they could do but grin and bear it.