Can internet companies know if there’s an outage without people reporting it and if so, how can they tell?
In: Technology
Yes. I work for one of the big providers, and if its a major outage (like not just your house or business, but covers a bigger area) we typically will know before you. We have software and hardware that monitors all the major pieces of our network. When that software/hardware can no longer reach pieces of the network because the connection is broken, then it sends up alarms. It does take time to research the problem though. Is it hardware? Software? Did someone just shove a backhoe through a bundle of fiber? That part can take a while. So until we know, as the customers come in, we just open tickets and let them know we are researching it.
For the ELI5 part of explaining monitoring, think of it this way. Everything in the network is connected together like pieces of string tied to your finger. And everything always keeps tugging on the strings and keeping them tight. When a piece of equipment fails or there is a fiber cut, that string goes slack.
In reality it’s more like the software/hardware doing the monitoring reaches out to the equipment every few minutes and checks for errors through a protocol called SNMP or one of the many other methods. If the equipment doesn’t respond, or comes back and says it has an error, then we raise the alarm. Equipment can also be setup to notify us if there is an alarm for faster alerts, but, if there is a fiber cut it won’t be able to contact us.
Yep. Your modem/cable box communicates back and forth with the ISP all the time; all it takes is these to stop for them to diagnose an outage.
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