On Boxing Day, Demon’s DNS servers/records basically died. This meant that customers’ web sites disappeared but more importantly because there were no DNS records at all, e-mails also disappeared.

I first noticed this when my e-mail server wasn’t apparently responding – we have the SMTP e-mail service so all e-mail for a domain name is pushed to this server – and when I checked on Demon’s network status page, nothing untoward was reported.

So I waited for a while in preference to banging my head against a wall, also known as ringing the non-UK technical support [sic] call centre. Since Demon was taken over a few years back and the first line support out-sourced or otherwise transferred abroad, ringing them has been a complete waste of time as they Don’t Have A Fucking Clue which, coupled with a Cannot Be Arsed attitude, adds up to more annoyance for the poor customer.

In my case, we’re being billed incorrectly still – the wrong rate and the wrong name – which is why our bills are almost double what they should be (and there’s the small matter of a one-off charge for £700 recently…) despite two phone calls recently and a letter earlier in the year. Yes, a letter. To an Internet Services Provider. And to cap it all, I recently received two letters with identical content from them on the same day both saying “as you have not been in touch…”.

Pathetic!

It’s just as well the broadband product itself is pretty good, though at £40+VAT (or £69+VAT as they haven’t managed to sort out the billing yet) per month, it bloody well should be good. And yes, our 20:1 contended, 8Mbps service is actually only performing at around 2500kbps but hey…

So anyway. Back to Boxing Day. I eventually decided to ring them and chose the option for the automated status line which was a good call as only then did I discover that yes, they were having a complete DNS failure, which was eventually resolved very late on.

So what does their Network Status Message of the Day have to say about it? Nothing. It’s as though it had never happened!


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