🚀 go-pugleaf

  This announcement affects all customers trying to connect between
             17:30 and 21:00 hours BST on June 11th 1996
         ===================================================


Owing to a failure of the software running on the authentication
servers (triggered by an unusually large number of customers logging in
at the same time) customers may have experienced problems logging in
between the hours of 17:30 and 21:00 BST on June 11th.

Customers would have experienced extremely slow logins, or the message
Password Incorrect, during the outage.

Notices were put on status@gate and motd@gate, but unfortunately these are
only visible after a successful login.  We are looking to see if there are
any other ways customers can be notified of problems should such a failure
re-occur.

After investigation it appears that the software running on the Demon
authentication servers fell into a race condition and were unable to
verify new logins.

The problem was quickly spotted, and involved a complete shutdown and
restart of the accounting and logging servers.  This took considerably
longer than would have been liked and steps are being taken to speed up the
process.

In addition, changes are being made to the software running on the
authentication servers to ensure that such a 'race' condition should not
occur again.

Thank you to all the customers who paged the Emergency Pager with
reports of login problems.  As you can appreciate, it was not
practicable to respond to these calls as staff were busy analysing,
then remedying the problem.

Demon Internet wish to apologise to customers for any inconvenience
caused during this break in service.

-- 
Jon Morby                                  Demon Internet Ltd
Gateway House, 322 Regents Park Road, London, N3 2QQ, ENGLAND
Offering Full Internet Connectivity for only a tenner a month