layout: post title: Primus Talkbroadband is currently down (June 1, 2004) created: 1086135158 categories:

• VoIP
• Canada

The TalkBroadband service is currently down. The tech support page has not been updated.

Patricia H. at tech support from Primus explained this to me, as they apparently don't have access to update the website. There is no ETA, and she was not able to say what the problem may be.

Primus tech support may or may not be checking in here to leave comments.

Update: the status has been updated to say "the system is down" (obscure Strongbad reference).

Use my cell phone number to get in touch with me in the meantime.

Update 2: so it looks like it's back up again. No explanation of what was going on. Might I add, I posted this initial notice at around 5pm, and it took another one and a half hours to get a notice up on the status page (which didn't have any more information, and is simply listed as "resolved"). The call center techs weren't too pleased about it either -- Patricia H. acknowledged that they knew that many (if not most) of their customers were themselves technically savvy, and that their instinctive reaction was to go check things out online.

For me, I had recently fiddled with some network settings on my router, so I spent a bunch of time tearing apart my network and trying to figure out what was going on. Only to have tech support tell me that yes, the network had problems.

The lesson? Give your tech support people access to a tool that allows them to post updates themselves, instead of waiting for some other department to do it for them. Oh ya -- I'd also subscribe to an RSS feed of network status for my broadband provider, cellphone provider, and VoIP provider.