, 2 min read

Vodafone Internet Outage #2

Today, 14-Oct-2024, starting at 16:23 (CET), internet provided by Vodafone was unavailable.

Photo

At 20:51 internet was available again. So for almost five hours I had no internet and the blog went dark. Luckily, the IP address stayed the same, so I had no delay in DNS.

DOCSIS signal noise ratio is now good again.

Photo

1. Contact support. I tried to call the hotline of Vodafone but gave up after waiting in the line for more than 25 minutes. According to their own website they have a major outage in my region. They say they need three days to fix it. This means: my homepage, i.e., this blog, is unavailable for three days.

Photo

I used 5G to connect to their website and request an SMS, when internet is available again. I never received any SMS from them.

2. Google fonts. I now learned the hard way that not only my blog is not available outside my home, but also inside my home the blog experiences a severe and annoying delay. Reason: As I use Google fonts, and Google is not available for me, everything is lagging. This makes me think about:

  1. PWA: progressive web app
  2. How to Convert Your Static Site into a PWA

That way there might be a better buffering of my content.

3. History of outages. I blogged about previous internet outages:

  1. In 2022 the Vodafone internet router was defective.
  2. No internet on 08-Jan-2024.

4. Uptime monitors. The uptime monitors correctly diagnosed the problem.

  1. Hetrix
    • Down: Noticed at: 2024-10-14 15:31:00 (UTC+01:00)
    • Up: Noticed at: 2024-10-14 20:00:42 (UTC+01:00)
  2. BetterUptime
    • Down: Started at: 14 Oct 2024 at 04:46pm CEST
    • Up: Resolved at: 14 Oct 2024 at 10:15pm CEST (automatically)
  3. UptimeRobot
    • Down: Incident started at 2024-10-14 17:06:17
    • Up: Resolved at 2024-10-14 20:05:22
  4. ping-failure-test every 30 minutes
Mon Oct 14 04:39:20 PM CEST 2024
Mon Oct 14 05:09:06 PM CEST 2024
Mon Oct 14 05:39:06 PM CEST 2024
Mon Oct 14 06:09:06 PM CEST 2024
Mon Oct 14 06:39:06 PM CEST 2024
Mon Oct 14 07:09:06 PM CEST 2024
Mon Oct 14 07:39:06 PM CEST 2024
Mon Oct 14 08:09:06 PM CEST 2024
Mon Oct 14 08:39:06 PM CEST 2024

Obviously, Hetrix is the most detailed monitor.

Added 10-Nov-2024: How To Define Custom Fonts in CSS with @font-face and font-display mentioned font-display:

optional: The text is given a very brief block period to load (~100ms). If the font doesn’t load during that block period, the fallback font is used and the custom font is not loaded at all. However, the font is still downloaded and cached behind the scenes. This means that, on subsequent page loads, the custom font will become available in the cache and then will load instantly.

That's what I now use to immunize against slow font loading in case of internet outage.