What a crappy 24 hours the last day (March 7th) has been. For those of you who have had problems getting to this site (or many other WordPress blogs), there has been an issue with the Bell Sympatico ISP routing for Canadian customers. To whit, quoting a support forum post by “foolwisdom” of the WordPress staff:

“The issue came to a head last night when we finally identified a routing issue between Bell Canada and one of the IP blocks assigned to us in one of our datacenters in Texas. We have currently routed traffic around the problem area and are working with our provider and Bell Canada to resolve the routing issue.”

And further in the same thread by “barry”, WordPress Key Master:

“Based on the traceroutes we have received from various users and the information we have received from our upstream provider, Bell Cananda is routing traffic destined to one of our IP blocks in a loop. The traffic is not being correctly routed out of the Bell network. This is likely a simple configuration error on their end and may or may not affect their routing of traffic to other IP blocks/websites. Our upstream provider has contacted their Network Operations Center and informed them of the problem, but as Bell Canada customers, it would also probably be helpful if you contact them as well. Unfortunately, since the configuration error is not within our network, there is nothing we can do to fix the problem. As a temporary workaround, I have routed the majority of blog traffic around the problem area for the time being.”

My sincerest gratitude to the WordPress users and Admins who worked so hard to identify the cause of this issue and who did not relent on proving to Bell Sympatico that the problem was with their system and not WordPress, and who proactively created a workaround.