My phone has had this message since last night. Sketchy details on some forums about big network issues. I live in Farnborough and work in Bracknell – no service in either.

Anyne one else having problems or have details on when it’s all gonna come back?

Yes same here, tunrs out they had a break in.

BBC Story

Bit worrying when a phone companys Disaster Recovery is so ropey…

Sounds like they had equipment damaged, but yes you would think there would be a back up in case this happened.

Switch site got ram raided. Stole a bunch of network routers. Probably in the back of a van on the way to Albania.

DR for something major might be to re-route away from that site – which will take a bit of time to invoke (as lots of switches/router changes will be involved).

DR plans are risk-based – if a couple of units go down then there will be spares to switch over to. If loads of stuff is nicked and cabling/power damaged then it’s a bit more complex. Without knowing all the detail about what’s happened and what needs to be changed to recover it’s difficult to comment.

The risk of someone ram-rading a switch site was probably considered low… that might need to be reconsidered now!

my view is you’d plan for a whole site going offline, for whatever reason, not just a few router failures within it.

Easier to deal with entire site loss than multiple random failures in a single site.

wwaswas – you’re right – but the DR plan might be so complex it takes a while to recover. Be interesting to see how long it takes to get stuff working again. Still, not really my area of expertise.

Statement on the VF web site: “We had a break in last night at one of our technical facilities which resulted in damage done to some of our equipment. This means that some customers may be experiencing temporary loss of voice, sms and internet services. We are working quickly to restore these and will be back to normal as soon as we can. There has been no impact on the privacy of customers’ data”

From reports of what’s been pinched it sounds like they knew exactly what they were after. Not the sort of kit you can flog on eBay!

Easier to deal with entire site loss than multiple random failures in a single site.

How so? why not switch the whole site over if they are multiple failures at a single site? Just treat it as a site failure. I don’t see how partial failure is worse than total failure at a location.