Another case of the ‘Titanic Effect’? Carrier grade redundancy is a term used in voice/data communications to imply a very high level of redundancy – perhaps the mythical no single point of failure even!
No matter how much we invest in redundancy it is still possible to fail. A week or so back it was the National Australia Bank.
Today it is telecommunications company Vodafone who have suffered a major outage to their Australian network.
This is the latest in a series of problems for the company, which has seen a class action lawsuit initiated by their customers.
Vodafone are the #3 mobile carrier in Australia (behind Telstra and Optus). It will be interesting to see where the blame for this outage falls. Recent problems have been attributed to network capacity issues, the sudden explosion of smart phones and a software problem.
It will also be interesting to see how they go in Crisis Management mode. Crisis Management and adaptive capacity to respond, these are the attributes we have to rely on when the redundancy fails.
UPDATED, 26 April. See this link where Vodafone are offering free SMS as compensation, also advising that the problem was in a single exchange, and it impacted the core network components that manage the SMS function.
Happy Easter, especially to all those Vodafone customers who have not been able to call or email their greetings.
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