Network Failure Causing Outage for Photo Sharing Service

What Went Wrong?

The Photo Sharing status experienced a brief period of complete inaccessibility lasting approximately 9 minutes.

What was the issue?

Maintenance crews for the ISP providing internet services to the server hosting the Photo Sharing Service (Virgin Media) disconnected the fibre line as part of their maintenance. This maintenance or the disconnection were not planned and had no prior warning so were completely unexpected and caused a total outage as there is no backup/fallback ISP (yet!)

Costs & Length of Downtime

The affected service was down for approximately 9 minutes at one time.

How This Will Be Prevented in the Future

I am looking into the possibility of redundant ISPs through a 4G/5G-backed system to fall back on if the primary fails (or in this case, has unplanned maintenance).

Photo Sharing Service recovered.

Photo Sharing Service went down.