Addressing the September 12, 2019 Service Outage

SFCN Customers,

Unfortunately, yesterday was a very difficult day at SFCN. We experienced a widespread outage on our FTTH service and it took some time to get everything back up and running. I apologize to our loyal customers. You have always been very supportive of our network and all the effort we put into it.

The outage was caused by unforeseen issues while upgrading our core network router during our weekly system mainenance window (Thursday mornings 2 AM - 8 AM). The delay in deploying the necessary fix was caused by one of our service providers needing to make changes on their system before it would all work properly. The delay was unfortunate and we try to avoid any and all such delays.

Network outages, like power outages, will rarely occur, but can't be completely avoided. I know it is very painful, and believe me, we do everything we can to avoid them, but they will occur. The Internet access we purchase is from the largest providers in the world and yet, their networks also experience outages. After 30 years in this industry, I can say without a doubt that all networks experience outages. PERIOD. FULL STOP. Google's network experienced a wide ranging outage last month and I can't even imagine the resources they have to spend to avoid them. Facebook, Google, Microsoft have all had significant outages in the last couple of years. They just can't be completely avoided. I wish they could.

I appreciate your understanding with this issue. Yesterday was a very painful day at SFCN. We hate whenever our service isn't perfect and really do strive to be as close to perfect as possible. Hopefully you and I won't experience another day like that for a very long time.

Sincerely,

John Bowcut
SFCN Director