Single Point of Failure: The Bresnan Experience
For those of you that are Bresnan customers, located in Colorado, Wyoming or Montana, you already know the news - “Bresnans Down!” – and yes, I’m an effected customer as well.
That’s right, in 3 states, Bresnan Communications is down for Internet and VOIP digital telephone. Three States!! How the heck did this happen?
With the worlds lessons of redundancy, how is it possible that a single catastrophic event can take out service in three states?
The answer? No One Knows! It took 12 hours, but look at the message that they leave us on there homepage:
Thanks for pointing out the obvious Bresnan!!
Several of the local news media tried to contact Bresnan, and they were in the same boat as us – the phone lines were so jammed up, that they couldn’t get through.
Absolutely no communication with customers is bad for business. I first recognized the problem at about 8PM. I decided that it was a glitch in the system, and I’d look into it in the morning.
Morning rolls around, and I have partial Internet. Fortunately I was using a public DNS server so that I could browse without relying too heavily on Bresnan. That’s all I needed. It was enough for me to get on Twitter, and see what the heck was going on. And they were just as clueless as me.
Bresnan made absolutely no attempt to communicate with it’s customers about what’s happened. They had over 12 hours (and counting) and we’ve heard nothing from them. I’ve gotten Internet, but mail is flaky and phones are still out (business phones mind you).
And no ETA on when service will be restored.
The lesson to you: Always keep you customers informed. Help them. Love them. They are your real stockholders. They are the reason you are in business. Treat them better than your employees and your family (which should already be super-duper).
Leave them in the dust, and they will leave you. Treat them well, and they will remember you forever.
I still don’t know what’s really going on, and I have enough redundancy in my plan that I’m not overly effected, just inconvenienced. But it would be nice to have an update as to when things will be back to normal.
With President Obama visiting our town this weekend, I’m almost bound to throw a conspiracy theory out there that someone cut the hard line in the name of national security….
Remember, I treat you well by keeping you in the loop… now if I could just convince you to remember me forever 
About the Author
Matt Kettlewell is an Internet marketer, Wordpress guru, blogging advocate, computer programmer, speaker, consultant, and a really fun guy! Visit his main blog at Kettlewell.net, his Wordpress expressions are at Blogging Emergency and his joint success pages with The Moxie Maven can be found at Mox & Dom.
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