Telewest managed to get the TV Drives back up and running after a seven hour outage yesterday. The official line says:
A configuration issue on our network caused this outage.
Sounds fishy to me, non TV Drive boxes weren’t affected so the majority of the network was intact. I guess it’s possible that they tried to push a upgrade to the boxes but it’s bizarre to do it nationwide in the middle of a Saturday. If they did to that and their update server died in the middle of it then I suppose that might hose the boxes until they got the server back.
But who knows what really happened? The problem with these sorts of things is that the customers are rarely really told what went on. In fact the customer services department are rarely told so the end users have no hope. Does it really matter? Do we benefit, as customers, from knowing the details after the fact? Is there any harm in putting the information out there?