Why didn't our backup internet fail over?
Backup internet failovers often fail during an outage because both the primary and secondary connections are routed through the same physical cable or suffer simultaneous outages. This leaves offices unexpectedly disconnected until staff can troubleshoot upstream peer failures and switch to a truly independent backup provider.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
- 1Switching to a backup ISP
- 2Using multiple circuits or hoping communication gets restored quickly by splicers
In their words
Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.
“This morning I got a call that internet was down at one of our offices. Our ISP peers with Zayo, and traceroute fails after the Zayo hop in Seattle. Switching to our backup ISP who doesn't peer with Zayo, everything's running fine.”source ↗
“I got a flight tomorrow AM from LGA, pouring one out for the splicers and hoping for the best”source ↗
“Yeah, I saw they're saying the primary died and they only found out the backup was down when it didn't fail over. So, either you had two simultaneous failures or your primary and backup were routed through the same cable.”source ↗
“How in the world does a TRACON facility not have redundant communications?”source ↗
Where this came up
People with this problem also raised
- 55HubSpot is down and timing out right now
- 14Why are clients suddenly ghosting contracts and sales slowing down?
- 2Why does school admin never show up during a student crisis?
- 4Locked out of new network switches because the consultant left
- 14Why are equipment service bills so expensive for minor fixes?
- 2Why do remote support tools keep giving generic error messages?