ALKHOBAR, 23 September 2003 — Saudi Internet users were without service Sunday due to an incident still under investigation by the Internet Services Unit (ISU) at King Abdul Aziz City for Science and Technology (KACST).
Local Internet service providers (ISPs) were informed early Sunday morning that at 4:10 a.m. an unexpected outage occurred due to hardware failure and that an end time to the problem was unknown.
It soon became apparent that the situation was critical. Not only was Internet browsing capability disabled, but even e-mail could not be handled properly. As the day progressed the situation became worse as the e-mail backlog increased.
Servers set to automatically retry e-mail delivery raised the pressure on an already crippled network with the result that some e-mail bounced, some was lost and all e-mail delivery was delayed.
By afternoon, businesses across the Kingdom were struggling to cope with customer outrage and impaired productivity. Internet service did not return till 5:30 p.m. and even then many users claimed it was less than optimal.
A statement issued yesterday by Dr. Eyas S. Al-Hajery, general director, ISU, KACST, read: “The ISU would like to apologize to all of it’s customers for the unexpected outage experienced yesterday due to unforeseen circumstances. The detailed reasons behind the incident are still being investigated, however early indications point to abnormal incoming traffic on the international transit lines resulting in the surfacing of a hardware failure in a central networking device which was compounded by a pre-existing manual configuration entry and changes made by upstream providers.
“All of these factors conspired to result in an unexpected delay in the time to resolution despite the ISU’s best efforts in this regard and the fact that it had begun coordination promptly upon the first indications of this incident. The ISU has subsequently taken the needed steps to avoid a recurrence of this problem, including joint coordination with all relevant parties and the international vendor for this equipment.
“As always, customer service and satisfaction is priority one at the ISU and every effort is expended to meet that goal. Regardless of the source of this anomaly, the ISU feels that it was primarily at fault for not providing the requisite immediate resolution thereby resulting in it lasting more than 90 minutes. For this reason, the ISU will be reimbursing all customers the sum of 24 hours of service as compensation for this outage.”