My letter to some of the big wigs at Vodacom this morning. Even Mybroadband is loading with half of its .css all screwed up it it even loads at all.
My letter:
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Dear Vodacom
Unfortunately since a major outage you experienced at your core about 2 weeks ago (publicized on radio that day) things have just not been going right ever since.
To remind you about the outage, there was a major failure at your core (I suspect) about 2 weeks ago which lasted about 3-4 hours during which time one could not browse the internet, could not make a call, could not send an sms and could NOT EVEN CALL Emergency Services on 112. On the way home from work that day a public apology was sent out on EWN news on highveld from Vodacom apologising for the (apparently countrywide) outage.
Since that date your systems, data AND phone calls have been especially bad but data and internet browsing has been utterly useless and terrible with today being one of the worst days yet.
I know for a fact Vodacom runs a lot of Ghost proxies and caching systems to save on bandwidth but prior to your outage these had always been behaving properly.
Since the outage you are caching pages for anywhere up to 10 minutes and not allowing clients to refresh pages in their browsers, thereby ignoring the server serving the requests cache specifications.
I develop a lot of web sites and when I make a change to a .php script on a wordpress site I expect to see my changes immediately. I now have to wait 5-10 minutes until I see my changes which wastes my entire day because something that should take me 5 minutes takes me 1-2 hours to achieve .... so much for progress .... you should change your slogan and steal one from Standard Bank except change it to "Vodacom -- Moving Backward".
The next problem is that your caches are serving completely blank web pages. This is happening on both local and international web sites so I doubt it has anything to do with Seacom but rather with a very messy core at Vodacom with some very messy caching servers misbehaving. For example for the last 10 days when I do a Google Search and click on a result only to find the result I clicked on was not what I was looking for I click back in my browser and get nothing but a blank white page which I then have to reload to get back to my last search results .... great fun indeed.
Today has been utterly terrible, I cannot open even 5% of the web pages I requested (local and international) as they either time out, either get rendered as a blank page or get rendered with all messed up CSS code making the web page look like they were coded by an amateur.
I seriously suggest this problem is looked into as I cannot work like this, we pay an absolute premium price for data from Vodacom and are really not getting the service since your outage occurred. I am using also using up 3-4 times my normal data usage due to the fact that I (an everyone in my office) has to keep refreshing pages all day long ..... great way to boost your data sales I must admit (well done).
I trust this matter will receive some serious attention as you are totally hindering the progress of my business as the last 2 weeks I have been migrating 4 web servers and over 30 web sites to new servers. This entire job should have taken me 2-4 days but has already stretched into 3 weeks now and I am still not done due to all the interruptions and disconnects occurring on your network.
I work on SSH all day to connect to my servers, but your network is constantly breaking the SSH pipe connections which requires me to retype my rather lengthy difficult passwords up to 100 times a day (per server) ...... I can just see my life wasting away in front of me and I cannot even express my frustration.
PLEASE GET THIS FIXED ASAP !!!!
My letter:
------------
Dear Vodacom
Unfortunately since a major outage you experienced at your core about 2 weeks ago (publicized on radio that day) things have just not been going right ever since.
To remind you about the outage, there was a major failure at your core (I suspect) about 2 weeks ago which lasted about 3-4 hours during which time one could not browse the internet, could not make a call, could not send an sms and could NOT EVEN CALL Emergency Services on 112. On the way home from work that day a public apology was sent out on EWN news on highveld from Vodacom apologising for the (apparently countrywide) outage.
Since that date your systems, data AND phone calls have been especially bad but data and internet browsing has been utterly useless and terrible with today being one of the worst days yet.
I know for a fact Vodacom runs a lot of Ghost proxies and caching systems to save on bandwidth but prior to your outage these had always been behaving properly.
Since the outage you are caching pages for anywhere up to 10 minutes and not allowing clients to refresh pages in their browsers, thereby ignoring the server serving the requests cache specifications.
I develop a lot of web sites and when I make a change to a .php script on a wordpress site I expect to see my changes immediately. I now have to wait 5-10 minutes until I see my changes which wastes my entire day because something that should take me 5 minutes takes me 1-2 hours to achieve .... so much for progress .... you should change your slogan and steal one from Standard Bank except change it to "Vodacom -- Moving Backward".
The next problem is that your caches are serving completely blank web pages. This is happening on both local and international web sites so I doubt it has anything to do with Seacom but rather with a very messy core at Vodacom with some very messy caching servers misbehaving. For example for the last 10 days when I do a Google Search and click on a result only to find the result I clicked on was not what I was looking for I click back in my browser and get nothing but a blank white page which I then have to reload to get back to my last search results .... great fun indeed.
Today has been utterly terrible, I cannot open even 5% of the web pages I requested (local and international) as they either time out, either get rendered as a blank page or get rendered with all messed up CSS code making the web page look like they were coded by an amateur.
I seriously suggest this problem is looked into as I cannot work like this, we pay an absolute premium price for data from Vodacom and are really not getting the service since your outage occurred. I am using also using up 3-4 times my normal data usage due to the fact that I (an everyone in my office) has to keep refreshing pages all day long ..... great way to boost your data sales I must admit (well done).
I trust this matter will receive some serious attention as you are totally hindering the progress of my business as the last 2 weeks I have been migrating 4 web servers and over 30 web sites to new servers. This entire job should have taken me 2-4 days but has already stretched into 3 weeks now and I am still not done due to all the interruptions and disconnects occurring on your network.
I work on SSH all day to connect to my servers, but your network is constantly breaking the SSH pipe connections which requires me to retype my rather lengthy difficult passwords up to 100 times a day (per server) ...... I can just see my life wasting away in front of me and I cannot even express my frustration.
PLEASE GET THIS FIXED ASAP !!!!