Symptoms of an Outage

"There is an issue with your modem or your Virgin Mobile account"

I first noticed the Virgin Mobile USA outage around 11 AM on Monday. I was in Las Vegas for Cisco Live 2011, and could not get online to prepare for and report from the event.

The MiFi refused to connect (not that unusual in the wide open spaces of the USA) and shortly began reporting an error message (shown above) when I tried visiting web sites in Safari on the iPhone.

One of hundreds of identical tweets sent by @VMUcare on July 11

AT&T was also having 3G issues in Las Vegas at the same time, so I had to disable 3G to get my iPhone online. Once it was running, I headed over to Twitter to check what Virgin’s @VMUcare account had to say. Sure enough, there were hundreds of messages about a “national 3G and text/MMS outage“.

Alarmingly, the Virgin customer service line +1(877)877-8443, was busy or could not connect. They were totally unable to assist customers!

This outage lasted most of the day, with no official status updates beyond “our engineers are working to resolve it as soon as possible.” In fact, I’m not sure Virgin Mobile USA even has a network status update page!

The Fix: Reset and Reboot

"Not Activated" is not a good sign the day after an outage

This morning, I contacted Virgin’s social media customer support email again, asking for a status update. The brief response suggested I should “perform a master reset on your device located in the bottom.” I had no idea what that meant, but presumed they were suggesting some sort of factory reset.

Rather than poking a paperclip into the hole by the battery compartment (since I didn’t have one and didn’t notice that hole), I decided to reset it in software.

The "Factory Reset" button is located in the "Advanced" menu's "System Status" tab

I logged into the device’s administrative interface, then clicked “System Status” under the “Advanced” menu. At the bottom of the page is a button to “Reset to Factory Defaults”, which I clicked.

You have to "lose everything" to get back online!

After a warning, the MiFi rebooted. I reconnected to the admin interface (after remembering that the password is “admin”) and reset it to my taste. I was finally back online!

Stephen’s Stance

As an IT guy, I know that outages sometimes happen. But a nationwide data outage that lasts almost a day and leaves devices unable to reconnect is serious. And a complete lack of any customer service availability or system status notification is absurd.

Virgin must immediately build better customer support processes and create a system status page; not everyone uses Twitter after all! And I expect a credit from them, since I just lost a substantial amount of my paid service at a critical time!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2011. | How To Reset Your MiFi and Get Back Online with Virgin Mobile USA
This post was categorized as Everything, Personal, Terabyte home. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Sprint USB EV-DO + Cradlepoint personal hotspot = sweet!

I was traveling this morning, and was shocked to not be able to check on my flight status with my iPhone. It just sat there churning when I arrived in Chicago. I couldn’t figure it out, but quickly booted up the Cradlepoint router and Sprint EV-DO card and was online. Since I also had critical work-related email to respond to, I would have been seriously upset if I didn’t have backup connectivity.

It turns out that AT&T’s network was out in quite a few locations. Although I didn’t see Chicago on he lists at first, it was definitely down this morning at 7 local time!

I guess my iPhone’s camera wasn’t the only thing on the fritz in Chicago!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2008. | AT&T Down, Sprint Saves My Bacon
This post was categorized as Apple, Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.