My parents have not been able to get to my website in about a week now. They’re using Comcast. I managed to ssh into their machine after having them tell me the new IP address (seems their DHCP-assigned IP address changed) and found that routing to some sites in the world was messed up — most importantly, routing to this website here.

Today, I got a call from my dad who was speaking to the Comcast cable Internet person, and he was told that AT&T decided to drop all of England from their network. Bye-bye U.K.!

As Comcast relies on AT&T for connectivity (as many others do), and this website is hosted in England, that meast my parents can no longer reach my website. It also means that they can’t get to any other sites hosted on the Nerdfest network (like Trae’s site, Tigert’s site, etc.), the BBC, or a number of various sites that all have one thing in common — being hosted in England.

The customer service representative informed my dad that this happened as AT&T blocked a whole country as they were “getting attacked” by “someone” in Great Britain.

It’s been around a week now since they first firewalled off the country. The representative on the phone said that things have been busy to their call center. I bet.

The clostest news item I can find related to this is News.com’s story on an outage blamed on a faulty router which is only supposed to affect people west of Chicago (and, thus, not the east coast of the United States).

Maybe the router incident is a scapegoat. Maybe someone, somewhere in either the AT&T or Comcast corporate chain is making up stories. If it is true that AT&T blocked an entire country — it’s just unacceptable, for whatever reason, especially for this length of time.

If you can read this, then you seem to be unaffected directly (or have a backup route somewhere)… or someone passed the corporate buck with a huge lie. Either way, something is severely wrong at AT&T and/or Comcast.