We reached out to Atlantic Broadband about the recent outage.
According to Atlantic Broadband’s Internet support on Sunday, September 1st, 2019, their DMCA department may have blacklisted barringtontownnews.com. That department’s staff didn’t get back to the office until Tuesday at 8 a.m. Most Barrington, NH residents, use Atlantic Broadband to access the Internet. We followed up with the DMCA department, and David checked their systems out to determine what the issue was.
As we previously reported, there's no legitimate reason as to why the website was blacklisted. Customers were told to use www.barringtontownnews.net to access the website until the problem resolved itself on Monday, September 2nd, 2019.
David couldn’t report his last-name per company policy. He said that he checked if there was any DNS server maintenance, as he indicated it was probably an issue with their DNS servers. He said it’s rare for them to blacklist a website, however, that they regularly blacklist email addresses that send SPAM to its customers.
David also said that he got a timeout when attempting to trace the route to Level 3’s network. It’s unclear if this was related to the outage. A customer in Barrington using Consolidated Communications reported being able to access the website just fine on Sunday.
The Atlantic Broadband employee said no system could have automatically blacklisted the website. He said that over the Labor Day weekend there was no higher-level network staff there, that would have been required to blacklist the site manually.
David said if it happens again, to check with someone out of state, because of the entire State of New Hampshire using the same DNS servers. It’s also notable that Atlantic Broadband has its local DNS servers that were likely the problem. We were able to access the Barrington Town News website after setting our DNS servers to 8.8.8.8, which is Google’s primary DNS server. This server's used in countries such as China that blocks internet traffic because Google’s servers include everything on the Internet. Atlantic Broadband’s DNS servers contain a smaller subset of networks that rely on caching sites commonly-accessed by local customers.
David works from 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. on Sunday through Thursday, so in case the problem occurs again, you should print out this article and call him during that time at 603-330-7704 to report the outage. He also said just because someone in their office can access to the website doesn’t mean customers in Barrington can.
If you think you’re having a problem with your Internet connectivity and you’re an Atlantic Broadband customer, you can contact their support at 800-952-1001. You can also reach the author of this article, Patrick R. McElhiney, who is the owner of MCE123 – a Marketing and IT Services firm in Barrington, at 603-742-5112 for any computer-related questions.
Remember that if this problem occurs again, you can also try to access www.barringtontownnews.net or www.barringtontownnews.org as well. If it’s a DNS issue like it was, then the .net or .org domain names could still be accessible.
Patrick R. McElhiney has a master’s degree in Information Technology from the University of New Hampshire and is currently studying in their Ph.D. Computer Science program in Durham. For IT-related questions, you can contact MCE123 at www.mce123.com. Patrick is usually available for IT service calls in the Barrington, NH area, and is more than happy to answer any of your IT or Marketing related questions.