Routing problem for some East Coast users (resolved)

We have gotten quite a few reports from users on the East Coast that they cannot connect to their Web sites on our servers, to our Web site, or to our e-mail servers.

Analysis shows that the problem is with a network called nlayer.net which is between them and our servers. When you make a connection to a remote server, the connection travels from your ISP, through several different intermediary networks, and finally to the destination network and server. Each of these networks needs to properly “route” the connection to the next closest node to the destination. The current problem seems to be that the data packets are getting lost within the nlayer.net network.

You can verify this by running the command “tracert www.tigertech.net” on Windows, or “traceroute www.tigertech.net” on Mac (Terminal). You’ll see that your packets can get through your ISP, but after they get handed off to nlayer.net the packets get lost. (A line that ends with *** is a failure.)

While you may have a problem in the network route between your computer and our servers, most other people on the Internet use different routes and can continue getting to your site just fine. You can also verify this with third-party sites, such as checksite.us.

This sort of problem is not uncommon, but is usually resolved within a few minutes. It’s up to nlayer.net to fix their routing; we presume they are working on it.

Update 9:56 AM (Pacific time): It looks like nlayer.net has fixed their problem. We see that customers who had been having problems can now reach their Web sites (and our site) successfully. Please note that no incoming e-mail was lost during this. Any incoming e-mail would have queued up for later delivery, and will get redelivered to our mail servers (soon, if not already).

Even though the cause of this problem was out of our hands, we certainly regret the inconvenience that it caused those who were affected.