I work for a company which runs a number of websites, and we recently made some DNS changes to our sites which should not have caused a problem for any of our customers. Indeed, most customers were fine, but a few customers suddenly couldn't get to our sites. We quickly found that all the customers with problems were using Orange broadband (regular broadband and also mobile broadband), and we've now had dozens of Orange customers with the same problem - it seems to be affecting everyone on Orange but nobody else.
After some investigation it became apparent that Orange's DNS cache servers, which are assigned to all Orange customers, had got the wrong DNS information and were failing to give customers access to our sites. I confirmed this by getting a couple of customers to do nslookup commands which showed the problem was with Orange's DNS cache servers (cache0.orange.net and cache1.orange.ne), and I double-checked this by getting a couple of customers to bypass the Orange DNS cache servers with the Google Public DNS service - after they did this the problems went away completely.
At this point I filled in the contact form on Orange's website to let their technical support know about the problem. I got an email back saying they weren't going to investigate because we weren't a customer. So, I set up an Orange mobile broadband account and got a dongle - as expected, I wasn't able to get to our websites via the Orange connection even though I could see sites such as Google etc. So, now that I was a customer, I phoned up their technical support for mobile broadband, only to be told - after a long discussion - that there was nothing they could do and that I'd have to go back to the Orange website and fill in the contact form on there. So I filled in this form again and explained all the problems in detail. This was at 6pm last night and I've had no response at all.
Additionally, there's a person from some frontline customer support department who got in touch with us after one of our customers with Orange complained to him that they couldn't get to our sites. He seemed quite concerned for a while and he tried to pass the problem over to their tech team, but although I keep asking him for updates he's gone quiet now and, although I supplied him with all the technical details necessary to show him that the problem was with Orange's DNS cache servers, still nothing has been done and I've been given no indication of whether anyone technical at Orange has even started to look at the problem.
This problem has now been going on for over a week. I've been telling Orange about the problem using every method available to me, and many of our customers who are on Orange have also been contacting Orange to tell them about the problem and ask when it's going to be resolved. There has been absolutely no response from Orange and nothing done at all in all this time. It's bad enough that Orange's DNS cache servers are obviously broken and severely affecting all our customers, but to fail to fix the problem or to even provide any sort of helpful response regarding the problem is, in my view, absolutely appalling.
If any Orange customers reading this are curious about the problem and have a spare moment, please try to visit http://www.uk.castingcallpro.com/ and see whether you can get to the site. (We have many other sites too, but this is one of our main sites.) I'd be really interested to see whether _anyone_ on Orange can get to it. Bear in mind that this site is visible to all Internet users not on Orange!
I'd also be interested to know if anyone on Orange has had similar problems with failing to get to specific sites that were available from other Internet Service Providers. Additionally, does anyone know of any person in department in Orange that might be able to help, and if so how might I contact them?
Orange may have been allocated a set of IP addresses that have just been re-assigned and your host still has them on a block list.
o2 (now Sky) ran up against this problem back in 2009.
Thanks for the suggestion but this doesn't seem possible because the customers can see other websites OK and also because they can see our sites OK if they bypass the Orange DNS with Google Public DNS. Also, I've checked the IP I've been assigned on my Orange mobile broadband connection and it's definitely not from an unallocated range (and I can't see our websites from this connection).
I am quite sure this is a problem with Orange's DNS cache servers.
Using OpenDNS on a non-Orange connection, the URL resolves OK.
Tracert times out after hop 8 = 87.238.85.12
Is your IP address nn.125.122.72 ?
Yes. It's normal for the traceroute not to get to the destination, but that's not a problem. Good to know that Orange customers can use OpenDNS as an alternative DNS provider as well as Google Public DNS.
Thanks for taking the time to have a look at this, but these aren't actually problems and I think they're distracting us from the real issue. It's quite normal for a website's IP to resolve to a different domain name than the domain name of the website (try it with www.google.com if you're not sure - it resolves back to e.g. wy-in-f99.1e100.net). And I don't know what 'whois' you're trying to perform but our domains give perfectly normal whois responses just like any other (you obviously need to do the whois on the root domain name, not the subdomain with 'www.uk' at the start).
So everything is perfectly normal with our websites. The problem, as I have explained in detail, is with Orange's DNS cache servers.
If it is possible to ask 2/3 of your customers to contact me via customer.services@orange.co.uk, providing their landline/account numbers, I will escalate for you to see what we can do about this.
Please ask them to add 'Jonathan Orange Response' so the mails can be picked up quickly and forwarded to me.
Thanks very much for that, Jonathan. It's good to know there are a few people in Orange such as yourself who care enough to want to help (there is another frontline chap called Dan on the mobile broadband side who is doing his best to push our issue too). We now have an official message we give out to customers explaining about Orange's technical problems with DNS and giving Orange's contact details plus solutions such as Google Public DNS for bypassing the problem - I've added your details to the message so that you will hopefully soon get messages from a few customers, and it will be great to see if you can push this issue further within Orange. You probably already know this but our case reference number is STK 2647738.
I really hope we can continue to make some progress with this - we're now on our tenth day with this which is insane amount of time for something that just requires a prod of the DNS cache servers in order to save dozens of Orange customers from being blocked from our sites.
So this has now been going on for more than two weeks and all we've got back from Orange are vague responses about how it's 'being investigated' by the 'relevant department'. When I ask what the 'relevant department' is it seems to change every time. There is no indication of what is actually being done or what the timescales for resolution are, and no indication that anyone in Orange has taken responsibility for the problem.
I've never known a technology company that shows such total disinterest in its customers, particularly when the problem is affecting so many of its customers and even more especially when the problem is caused by their own malfunctioning servers. It's truly appalling.
So this has now been going on for more than two weeks and all we've got back from <a href="http://www.maccodes.co.uk" target="MAC">Orange</a> are vague responses about how it's 'being investigated' by the 'relevant department'. When I ask what the 'relevant department' is it seems to change every time. There is no indication of what is actually being done or what the timescales for resolution are, and no indication that anyone in <a href="http://www.maccodes.co.uk" target="MAC">Orange</a> has taken responsibility for the problem.
I've never known a technology company that shows such total disinterest in its customers, particularly when the problem is affecting so many of its customers and even more especially when the problem is caused by their own malfunctioning servers. It's truly appalling.
That seams to be a typical response from Orange, its as if they are using stalling tactics in a hope the problem fixes itself or the customer stops complaining.
That's precisely the impression I've got - that they literally just ignore the problem and hope it goes away. Unbelievably, people are still phoning Orange about this and getting told that there is no problem. I simply don't understand how a company can be so totally and utterly useless.
I feel extremely sorry for anyone using Orange as their ISP and can only assume that Orange won't have any customers left soon, as I can't see how anyone could put up with this unbelievably awful service.
After four weeks I solved this with no help from Orange. As we'd tried everything else, I actually moved our DNS hosting to a different DNS hosting provider. This is a very extreme thing to do, but I hoped that doing something this extreme would finally kick Orange's broken DNS cache servers into updating themselves with the right information. This took a lot of time and cost us money, but thankfully it did have the desired effect. If this hadn't worked then I can only assume that Orange customers would never have been able to access our sites again.
Orange's 'customer service' was consistently appalling, and even weeks after we first told them about the problem they were STILL telling some customers that they didn't know anything about it. As for their technical staff, all that was needed was for them to flush the offending records out of their DNS cache so that the caches would update with the correct new information. This is something I can do on our DNS cache servers in a matter of seconds. I simply cannot understand why, in all that time, they couldn't have done this simple task in order to allow their customers to get to our sites again.
After this shocking experience, I sincerely hope I never have to deal with Orange for anything of this nature - or indeed for any reason at all - ever again.
I've been having problems recently with some of my favourite sites that used to work perfectly. For example www.padi.com used to work fine but now i get a Server not found message (my friends with other ISP's can get in with no problems). My lap top, netbook and Ipod Touch are all unable to access this site.
Today i have noticed that a few other sites have stopped working, such as www.alfaowner.com which is now giving me a connection timed out error.
I haven't changed anything on my system, the router is the livebox that i've had for ages and no new software has been installed or any settings changed!
You certainly have my sympathy. Sites seem to disappear from Orange's DNS cache for very long periods of time. Our sites were lost for weeks to Orange users and might never have come back at all if I hadn't forced them to update with a radical DNS configuration change.
As ever, I'm amazed Orange have managed to retain as many customers as they have for this long. I know their broadband is cheap, but there are other cheap broadband services available in the UK which are infinitely better.
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