RSAWeb still facing network problems 2 days later

This probably hasn’t been a good week for you if you work at or rely on internet service provider RSAWeb. Early on Wednesday, 1 February, the ISP announced that it was “observing a service-impacting event” affecting its network.

Now, two days later, the provider’s status page (last updated at 10:17 AM, 03/02) indicates that, while some services have been restored, many are still experiencing issues.

The ISP provided ongoing updates throughout Wednesday’s outage – for the few that still had internet access – with a notable update at 12:38 PM to say the “major incident” was complex and that the restoration process would take longer than expected. A repair timeline was not provided.

RSAWeb engineers are on it (we hope)

In the wee hours of Thursday morning, the ISP provided an update to say its engineers were able to restore fibre internet services for both business and consumer customers. Although, from some responses on Twitter, it seems some folks were still affected.

RSAWeb engineers reportedly worked through the night with updates occasionally shared on the RSAWeb Twitter and Facebook pages. However, it seems if you want up-to-date info, your best bet is to subscribe to email notifications, found at the top right of the ISP’s status page.

As welcome as an update may seem, we’re into the third day of the outage without a clear indication of a timeline or even a rough estimate as to when customers could expect the outage to be resolved. The ISP is also mum on the cause of the outage which internet denizens have taken as an invitation for speculation about the possibility that ransomware is responsible for the downtime.

The hope is that RSAWeb’s radio silence is because it’s all hands on deck as everyone scrambles to fix things and not because it’s attempting to recover from a ransomware attack that wiped out backups. Major ISPs usually are prepared for the worst with simple fixes like offsite backups.

The last update on the status page, posted at 12:00 PM, reports “mobile private APN services are slowly restoring.” The previous update, from 10:17 AM, mentioned engineers had made “good progress” restoring services for fibre customers still experiencing issues. But after three days, how good can that progress be?

With mobile APN and fibre services on the mend, that leaves core internal systems (including the mobile dashboard and customer portal), business VoIP, and cloud and virtual data centre services still to go.