Mad rush to buy Sinclair Spectrums
That's what it will be.
The websites of Dixons Retail Group electronics stores have gone down today - knocking over Currys, PC World and Dixons.co.uk. The sites have been offline since breakfast, but there's been some confusion about the cause of the outage. Initially visitors to the Currys' site had a "503 Unavailable Error" page pop up, then a …
Probably not. But they would sell you a headphone cable for the EAR IN socket that costs more than the machine itself.
I was once given a £5 Dixons voucher as a present. After two years, I threw it away because I couldn't buy ANYTHING with it and didn't want to give them any of my own money on top. Literally. Nothing. Not a USB cable, not a battery, nothing.
Even if they bought diverse fibre, telco's quite frequently "groom" fibres to "optimise" their utilisation as people cancel contracts, etc, and you suddenly find both your "diverse" paths travel down the same cable bundle. Unless you frequently audit your suppliers you WILL have this happen to you.
I've even heard of companies that go to different suppliers to get different paths ended up going down as the two suppliers both had fibre going through one tunnel as the best way to get from A to B. The rest of the paths were diverse, but they found out the single point of failure when something cut the cables in the tunnel......
The phrase that pays is 'Assured Seperacy' - and talking nicely to the Openreach planners when they come to do the surveys.
I think the IT director of DSG will probably be looking at a P45 tomorrow as the amount of money they'll have lost will have dwarfed the amount they would have paid for a proper diverse internet link.
And why don't they have a load balanced Business Continuity hosting site elsewhere in a data centre in case this happens?
Without a word of a lie...
I once worked in Incident Management for one of the major uk mobile telcos (Hint - They've been shopping today!)
They lost connection to an Irish based datacentre with both routes showing as down. A little investigation showed that although they thought they had redundancy, utilising two routes from two different suppliers, those two different suppliers were using the same pipe!
I used to work for a major UK bank. We had triple redundant connections between the City offices and our major datacentres, all with assured redundancy, all with separate suppliers. Needless to say they all went down at the same time, for about an hour. It turned out that two of the three telcos had changed their configuration, without discussing it with each other and the inevitable goon had dropped a floor tile into a trunk of fibres.
I was on the recovery call, I have never heard engineers and management beasted in quite the same way - it was costing us millions a minute in lost trades.