posted on August 23, 2002 02:07:12 PM new
On Monday evening, AuctionWatch’s systems began to experience intermittent Internet connectivity due to a problem at the company’s primary Internet Service Provider (ISP). Despite assurances from our provider that this was an isolated incident, their slow response prompted AuctionWatch’s engineering team to begin the process of transitioning all traffic to our secondary ISP (we maintain two ISP relationships to reduce the customer impact in the event that one of them might fail). Unfortunately the transition to another ISP can take several days to complete, as new Internet addresses must be mapped by ALL service providers on the Internet. Over the past few days, our primary providers continued to experience intermittent technical problems. Fortunately, as a result of our ISP migration, these intermittent failures impacted a steadily declining percentage of Internet users. Our primary provider believes they have corrected the issue and does not expect any additional system difficulties.
We apologize for any problems you may have experienced. We understand that system reliability is critical to your business, and we are working around the clock to ensure service availability and to select partners that we (and you) can depend on. It has been difficult to estimate the user impact of these system issues as the outages have been intermittent and have affected a steadily declining percentage of Internet users.
At this time approximately 2/3 of our Internet traffic is being routed through our secondary ISP and we expect to see a complete transition within the next 2 days. We have established a relationship with a new ISP who will serve as a more reliable backup once this transition is complete. In addition, to demonstrate our continued commitment to our customers, we will soon be announcing an AuctionWatch Free Listing Day.
