Cisco Blasted In Blogosphere For Website Outage

"Welcome. Welcome to a brand new day. A day that is, without Cisco's website," taunted the Valley tech gossip website Valleywag.com. "Apparently the 'human network' means the 'all too human network.' This is beyond embarrassing for the purveyor of network infrastructure. It's a technical snafu that verges on legendary."

The Digg.com website had a posting noting that Cisco was celebrating its bang up quarterly results and soaring stock price by "taking their site down."

Cisco itself addressed the outage in its own Cisco blog blaming it on a "facility" issue. "We have traced the cause of the issue to an accident during maintenance of a San Jose data center that resulted in a power outage in that facility," said a Cisco blog posting. "We would like to thank our customers and partners for their patience. We expect to resolve the issue shortly." Cisco's first blog posting on the outage came at 1:46 pm when the company noted that it was "experiencing some facility issues that are impacting services to Cisco.com. We have identified the cause of the issue and are working to quickly restore services."

One solution provider, who was prevented from configuring a Cisco solution at the Cisco.com website, wants to know if Cisco is eating its own network dog food.

"If Cisco has business continuity and web site load balancing in place then how can one data center failure cause the Cisco.com website to go down?" asked the solution provider. "It doesn't make sense. How can they be selling high end enterprise networking with load balancing and redundancy and not have it themselves?" A Cisco spokesperson was checking on exactly what kind of business continuity or redundancy technology was in place at the time of the outage.

The solution provider executive said Cisco could have suffered the same fate as some popular websites that saw their web sites go down during a San Francisco power outage last month. That outage affected a number of prominent internet sites including ecommerce website Red Envelope and the popular Craigslist. "In that scenario it looks like the backup generators didn't kick in because the transfer switch to take the power from the UPSes to the backup generators failed. I'd like to know if the same thing happened with Cisco."

The solution provider executive said he intends to use the Cisco outage as an example of why his customers should invest in redundancy technology and robust power management UPS solutions to assure an outage does not affect them. "We're going to tell clients Cisco went down because of a power issue. You don't want to be in the same boat as Cisco," he said. "We're going to use it as a selling scenario. We're going to tell customers that if the biggest and baddest technology company in the world went down how can you trust just (server) colocation?"

Another solution provider , who did not want to be identified, said it is unfair to poke fun at Cisco in the wake of the outage. "We don't know if it was a human error or piece of equipment error," he said. "They resolved it quickly. That's all that matters at the end of the day. Why do we need to know more than that?"

The Cisco partner said he has had customers, including school districts, buy Cisco equipment and never have a problem over seven years with the same network infrastructure. "Figure out the math on that," he boasted. "That's pretty good."

As a solution provider for Cisco, he praised the company's strong support for its channel partners. "The only time you take a shot at a company is when they screw up their channel programs or directly compete against you," he said. "That is when you get upset, not over something like this. I could care less about this outage. It's not a big deal. We don't live and breathe on their web site all day. We have all been in a situation when a piece of equipment has broken and it affects customers. It all goes back to how quickly you can resolve the issue. Obviously they resolved it pretty quickly."