Glitch knocks out Hawaiian Telcom's Internet service
The problem affected more than a quarter of its customers
More than a fourth of Hawaiian Telcom's high-speed Internet subscribers lost service for hours yesterday following a glitch related to an attempted software update.
Although Hawaiian Telcom had restored service to its 40 affected business customers by 10:45 a.m., the company expected it would take all day and much of the evening yesterday to restore service to all of the 25,000 residential customers who lost it, said Dan Smith, Hawaiian Telcom's vice president for corporate communications.
The problem affected 28 percent of the 89,253 DSL subscribers the company had as of the second quarter, the latest period for which data are available.
Hawaiian Telcom attributed the failure to a routine software upgrade, which the company performed early yesterday morning. Although several of the company's Internet routers accepted the software upgrade, one of them did not, Smith said. That left Hawaiian Telcom engineers scrambling to restore the original software back onto the router.
Smith said that Hawaiian Telcom has been in contact with its vendors, Lucent Technologies and Juniper Networks. But he said it is unclear why a circuit card in one router was incompatible with the software upgrade. Smith said the company had never encountered a problem during previous upgrades.
"We've been doing it regularly; we've been doing a lot of these things," he said. "This certainly came as a surprise."
The outages came as Hawaiian Telcom struggles to right itself amidst a rocky transition to a new operations and billing system. Hawaiian Telcom moved to the new system as a final step of its spin off from Verizon Communications Inc. But the system has been beset with problems, causing repeated billing errors that were continuing as recently as last month.
Last weekend, Hawaiian Telcom appeared to redeem itself, at least partially, when its wireline phone system remained online after Sunday's earthquakes and Oahu power outage that interrupted some wireless telephone service.
But yesterday's failure also partially tarnishes one of the bright spots in Hawaiian Telcom's business: Internet service. Despite losing landline customers, Hawaiian Telcom has been steadily gaining DSL users. Smith said the company hopes yesterday's glitch does not break that momentum.
"We're clearly taking this very seriously," Smith said.
At least two business customers were understanding about the problem.
"For us to ask that an Internet connection always be green, that's asking for a little too much," said Mike Mau, information technology manager for Pacific Health Research Institute, a nonprofit biomedical firm whose connection was down for a few hours yesterday. "You've got to be real."
Ed Keys, director of finance for La Pietra-Hawaii School for Girls, portrayed the lost service as a temporary irritation.
"Any time something like that happens, it's an inconvenience," he said. "But it's not life-threatening."
