Regional outages

A Regional outage means one of our locations cannot reach your address while the other locations can. For everyone the other locations stand for, your address is up, so a Regional outage is not an Incident: it never counts against your uptime, and it never appears on a Status page. It is still worth knowing about, because people near that location may not reach you either.

When one opens

It starts with a failure only one location sees. That location tries again, the other locations are asked to look, they get through, and no Incident opens, as How a failure is confirmed explains.

When that location keeps failing, a Regional outage opens once both of these are true, whichever comes later:

• its first failure is 10 minutes old, and
• it has 3 failed runs since its last success.

Time alone is not enough, because a Monitor with a long interval makes few runs in that time. One run that gets through starts both counts again.

A Regional outage covers one Check and one location. When two locations cannot reach your address, they are two Regional outages. It opens only while the Check has no open Incident, and it starts at that location’s first failure.

While one is open

You see it in three places:

• The Monitors list says “1 of 3 locations cannot reach it”, in amber. The Monitor’s status stays whatever its Checks say.
• The Events tab lists it as “Regional outage from Frankfurt”, with “1 of 3 locations · no Incident opened · uptime unaffected” under it. Expand it to see what each location saw.
• The Time to answer by location chart marks it with a band, such as “Frankfurt: regional outage”.

The Uptime card says it too: “Incidents count against uptime. Regional outages don’t.”

While a Regional outage is open, that location’s failures are already known: its failures on that Check ask no other location to look. When the other locations start to fail too, their failures are confirmed as usual and an Incident opens. The Regional outage stays open beside it.

The messages you get

You hear about a Regional outage through the Notification rules that include the Regional outage event. The Default rule includes every event, so it does. You get one message when it opens, saying your address cannot be reached from that location, and one when it can be reached from there again. Both say your uptime is untouched.

To stop hearing about Regional outages, untick Regional outage in the rule. You still hear about every Incident.

When one closes

A Regional outage ends once the location has got through for 5 minutes, with at least 2 successful runs. It closes faster than it opens, so it does not stay amber after the location is back.

It ends in one of these ways, each shown on its row as a badge:

• recovered: The location gets through again, as above. You get a message saying it can reach your address again.
• Monitor paused: Somebody paused the Monitor. Nothing is sent.
• retracted: We took it back, because the fault was in our own location. You get a correction in place of a recovery message.

When our location is at fault

Sometimes one of our own locations cannot reach many unrelated addresses that the other locations reach. That is no news about your address: the fault is ours, so we do not tell you, and no Regional outage opens.

When we find this out about a Regional outage that is already open, we take it back. Reported in error says what you receive then.