Demon service is beyond 'grave'

UK internet service provider Demon has come under fire over the last week after a number of router issues repeatedly crippled services for customers.

A number of emails from vnunet.com readers and Demon customers suggested that the ISP may have been suffering from extensive technical problems over the last week.

One reader, an IT manager for a major research corporation, said: "For almost six days now there have been extremely grave problems with their email services. This morning, internet services were down as well, meaning that we couldn't even fall back on webmail to get us through."

The network status page on the Demon website also paints a picture of glitches revolving around the mail services coupled with a handful of routing problems.

"For an ISP whose main services are email and internet, to have an outage for this long is unbelievable. Don't just take my word for it. Look at [Demon's status page] for their own admission of problems, and this is barely half the story," wrote a vnunet.com reader.

Demon's problems have also been picked up in the ISP forums. One posting on the ADSLGuide forum read: "Demon used to offer a fantastic service (second to none) which this weekend has degenerated into complete rubbish - just how long does it take to resolve 'internal routing problems' - is there no redundancy in their network?"

The ISPs status report for today admits that the company is "experiencing routeing [sic] problems which may affect all services."

But earlier reports in the status log show that customers have been experiencing problems with email for around a week now, causing delays and backlog of mail to build up. There are also reports of "emergency maintenance" that had to be carried out on a number of parts the network on 21 June.

The current situation seems to be that "some websites and services may be intermittently unavailable".

A Demon spokesperson was not available for comment at the time of going to press.