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SERVICE INTERRUPTION SATURDAY MAY 24
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Some time Saturday evening all fourteen of our PRI lines went down.  The
PRI lines are the multi-channel phone lines that carry all incoming calls,
so for the duration of the problem it was impossible to dial into BCPL's
access servers. As far as I can tell the interruption didn't last very
long.  I became aware of it at about 9:30 PM when I logged in to find
several e-mail messages reporting the problem.  The symptoms reported were
a "fast busy" signal, indicating the trunk line was too busy to accept
more calls, or an endless "ring - no answer", indicating the lines were
dead.

I was able to bring the lines back to life by rebooting all seven access
servers. What caused the outage remains a mystery, but I will see what I
can find out from Bell Atlantic after the Memorial Day holiday.  At our
end nothing short of a long-term power failure is likely to bring down all
fourteen PRI lines at the same time, so I suspect that something happened
at the Bell Atlantic switch.  If the switch feeding our lines went down,
it is possible that when it and the lines came back up our access servers
were unable to synch back up to them.  That would explain why rebooting
the access servers fixed the problem. 

Thanks to all of you who brought the problem to my attention!

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