Schoolsbroadband down (anyone else?)

[Frodo_Baggins]

Anyone else using Schoolsbroadband down? All of our schools have just gone offline and their support hub is down and I'm waiting on the phone now 🙃

[andy_b]

Lost multiple sites

[andy_b]

and back

[Frodo_Baggins]

Back now aswell, at least it was a short one

[synaesthesia]

Quelle suprise. 

There must be a reason for this to happen so often in comparison to other providers surely.

[Sonic007]

We are back up and running too. 
 

Thenkfully a short one this time. 

[gpjt]

Same here 6 sites offline, backups didn't kick in. Need to look at why we're paying for that service if it doesn't work!

[ovenchips]

All sites down, twice today! Once this morning and just now albeit coming back up.

 

[mitchell1981]

Weirdly for us, although almost nothing worked, Google search continued to work. Perhaps the reason for failovers not triggering is because it was never completely down. Our Smoothwall reported the internet connection as UP throughout.

[Sonic007]

23 minutes ago, gpjt said:

Same here 6 sites offline, backups didn't kick in. Need to look at why we're paying for that service if it doesn't work!

 

 

Same here. We are paying for a backup line and nothing happened.

[andy_b]

Quote

Our technical teams are actively investigating the issue and, based on our initial findings, we believe the cause may be upstream of our core network.

If it was upstream of SBB, your SBB backups aren't necessarily going to help.

[fiza]

We still have 2 sites with SBB and both went down this afternoon.  None of our other sites have had as many issues as these 2 sites. Cant wait until we move them away.

[CrootUK]

1 hour ago, mitchell1981 said:

Weirdly for us, although almost nothing worked, Google search continued to work. Perhaps the reason for failovers not triggering is because it was never completely down. Our Smoothwall reported the internet connection as UP throughout.

Same for us, for the first outage this afternoon everything google was available but nothing else. Smoothwall uses 8.8.8.8 to detect link status before downing a link in a link load balance pool so its a bit of a flaw there to be honest, I may log it with smoothwall @tom_newton, is it possible to configure LLBP to ping two different IPs? when an ISP has a BGP outage, but there peering with google is still fine it makes using smoothwall LLBP and having a backup broadband almost useless (without manual interaction which is a pain if you have many boxes/sites)

Edited October 15 by CrootUK

[tom_newton]

Interesting point... Dns servers are good because they're multicast, so unlikely to just become unreachable. It's false positives over false negatives really 

[CrootUK]

2 hours ago, tom_newton said:

Interesting point... Dns servers are good because they're multicast, so unlikely to just become unreachable. It's false positives over false negatives really 

Indeed, it would just be good if we could add another one in there? 1.1.1.1 or 9.9.9.9 or somthing. 

[FastFuser]

has there been an explanation/apology?

[Edu-IT]

I hard it was something to do with BGP.

[CrootUK]

[Sonic007]

Ive just had a million safeguarding filter notice email's come through just now for last month!

[sigma]

I was still getting them for a year after we left.

[FastFuser]

On 15/10/2026 at 14:57, Sonic007 said:

 

 

Same here. We are paying for a backup line and nothing happened.

Should have been tested for failover and monitored I would have thought?

[msi_school]

On 16/10/2026 at 19:40, FastFuser said:

Should have been tested for failover and monitored I would have thought?

Sadly the fail over for Schoolsbroadband only covers physical network issues, any thing logical is not fault tolerent.

[DrCheese]

Don't have our backup line via the same ISP for this reason - Even if the routes are physically seperate, if it's going back to the same network it's not really a backup line.

 

That said, we had the same issue with S/W only checking 8.8.8.8 not causing our S/W to drop the TS connection out of the LLB pool. Needed a manual removal.

[CrootUK]

1 hour ago, DrCheese said:

Don't have our backup line via the same ISP for this reason - Even if the routes are physically seperate, if it's going back to the same network it's not really a backup line.

 

That said, we had the same issue with S/W only checking 8.8.8.8 not causing our S/W to drop the TS connection out of the LLB pool. Needed a manual removal.

I've logged this with smoothwall now under #690021 hopefully its some functionality they can help us with here.