Just to finish the story I started in the last post, here’s what happened. The good news is that Optus found the reason for this blog being blocked and have restored things to normal. You should now be able to access this site, even on the Optus network. But the nonsense I had to wade through to get things resolved was just ridiculous.
After that last blog post describing the problem with my site being blocked by Optus for reasons unexplained, I posted it out on Twitter and Facebook. It’s amazing how quickly that gets a response. To their credit, I heard back from Optus’s Social Media Team very quickly offering to help resolve the issue. I’m not sure why problems can’t just be resolved by calling Tech Support, and why it takes a very public skewering on social media to get any action, but it apparently works that way now.
After a series of very promising back and forth tweets, I eventually got a call from a member of Optus’s Social Media Team, and their response was basically that this was not an Optus issues and there was nothing they could do about it, and that I needed to refer things back to my web host, GoDaddy.
Despite the fact that they admitted that Optus was blocking the site – actually an entire IP range, which just happened to include my blog – she insisted it was not something they could do anything about. She told me that I had to ask my webhost to deal with it, and fix the “malicious behaviour” on their servers, but she could not tell me what kind of malicious behavior was involved. She seemed unwilling to entertain my argument that if Optus was blocking the site – and she admitted it was – and if Optus was the only ISP that was having this problem, that asking my web host to fix a problem that was invisible to them was not likely to be successful. We went around and around in circles for about 25 minutes, with me trying to explain that this was a problem that only Optus could fix, and her insisting that this was not a problem that Optus could fix at all. She kept robotically insisting that Optus could not manually remove the block and I needed to call my web host and get them to deal with it.
Eventually, I gave up trying to reason with her. She had made her mind up that Optus could do nothing to fix the problem, so I went home and called GoDaddy. They guy I spoke to there, Mark, was very helpful and spent over an hour on the phone with me troubleshooting, trying different things, searching the Optus website for a form that would let GoDaddy get in touch with Optus to talk about the problem, but eventually coming to the same conclusion that I was trying to tell the woman from Optus – GoDaddy cannot fix a problem they cannot see and that they have no control over.
I got a followup tweet the next day from the Social Media Team at Optus which led to another phone call from them. This time it was someone who actually sounded like they understood networks, and they simply told me to email a copy of the traceroute and a quick explanation of the problem to [email protected] and they would deal with it.
Less than an hour later I got an email which said, in part…
“I have removed the IP address block that was on our systems. Please try again. Many apologies for the inconvenience this has caused and lack of coherent information on our side.”
I tried again and all was back to normal. Just like that.
All up, I probably spent 5 hours on the phone to both Optus and GoDaddy trying to get this issue resolved. From Optus I was told several stories about why the problem existed, many of them contradictory. I had both a tech support supervisor and the social media team person tell me flat out that this was nothing that Optus had any control over and that they could not manually fix. I was told to speak with my web hosts and they had to sort it out. I was told these things repeatedly, and even though I argued fairly strongly that I did not believe these things to be true, they were insistent that there was nothing they could do on their end. Despite being supplied with all the information, including traceroutes and network information, they still insisted that it was out of their control.
And then one guys from Optus fixes it. Just like that.
I hate being lied to. It’s ridiculous that I had to make phone call after phone call to get this resolved. It’s crazy that an actual tech support line achieves almost nothing even when you escalate the issue to a supervisor, and that you need to go all social media on them just to get attention. It’s ludicrous that someone from that team will argue with you in circles and insist that Optus can’t fix a problem they are in control of, and apparently not even explore the possibility of fixing it. And it’s so damn annoying that getting it resolved was as simple as sending an email with traceroute details, but it took many days and many phone calls to even be told about this option.
Glad to back, but totally over Optus as an ISP.
