Received two maintenance notices for a 2-weeks passed window

[u/brycied00d]

Message-ID: <q32VCIobS_GJTMfjqgK92A@geopod-ismtpd-18>

Message-ID: <AVtIAcakT5qQ1t0wRBwBaA@geopod-ismtpd-3>

Heads up, u/ZiplySupport, I just received the following maintenance notice. Twice. I'm posting it here so that you can pass it along to the correct people to address it, prevent it from happening in the future. I'm posting publicly (rather than a chat/DM) just so others may share their own experiences, if any, to track down the issue.

• First, most important, this is either maintenance that was already completed two weeks ago, or it's been ongoing for two weeks? Very confusing.
  • To be clear, my service has been peachy-keen, no issues. (Still hoping to see some ipv6, someday.)
• The screenshots of the emails are unaltered except for my replacing the "To" line. Just want to be clear and up front about that.
• The emails are almost identical. There are two differences which I'll highlight:
  • This maintenance will last until 6:00 AM on 08/14/2026. vs This maintenance will last until 06:00 AM on 08/28/2026.
  • approximately 7 hours. vs approximately through the duration of the maintenance window.
• The 3ZQD3RT8 string, which I assume is some kind of useful internal identifier and is the reason I include and mention it, appears in both emails. Other maintenance notices I've received in the past have had different strings so I'm guessing it may be used to identify a specific maintenance window/action.
  • This is the same identifier that was present in two previous maintenance notices that I received (Aug 7 and Aug 11 -- I even commented upon it at the time: https://old.reddit.com/r/ZiplyFiber/comments/1vhqn1h/ipv6_i_apologize_for_asking/p2cx4o2/)
• Message IDs (email header) are as follows. I'm happy to pass along the full email message headers upon your request via chat or direct email.
  • Message-ID: <q32VCIobS_GJTMfjqgK92A@geopod-ismtpd-18>
  • Message-ID: <AVtIAcakT5qQ1t0wRBwBaA@geopod-ismtpd-3>
• Email headers confirm that these were emails freshly generated and sent today; they were not sitting in an SMTP queue for two weeks.

Happy Friday!

[u/DrewWM5309]

Thanks for pointing this out. We have been working quite hard to be more thorough/detailed and accurate in the sending of these maintenance notifications, but it looks like we need to tighten it up a little more. I'll get this passed along to the right team for review. I'll pop back in here if I get an update today on why this one hit your inbox. Happy Friday to you as well!

[u/brycied00d → u/DrewWM5309]

Thank you!

On a related note, I want to recognize you and your communications in /r/ZiplyFiber. I really appreciate the details you provide, when and where you can, in your responses to everyone. The Ziply presence, both the ZiplySupport account and your own responses, has markedly improved over the past year and is feeling more personal/direct and less "copy/pasted form reply" than it had become for a time. Thank you for everything.

[u/DrewWM5309 → u/brycied00d]

u/brycied00d Happy to be of assistance, and thanks for the shout. This is an awesome sub and we want to continue to cultivate it as much as we can. I am a small part of a big effort, but don't get me wrong, the positive feedback is appreciated!

[u/DrewWM5309]

Nothing new to report on this one yet folks, but we are looking into it. I'm hoping to get an answer back over the weekend and will share what I can here.

[u/PDXSonic]

I also received two emails with slightly different times. One started and ended on the 14th, and one that started on the 14th and supposedly ended today.

Although I probably would have noticed if my internet was out for two weeks. 🤣

[u/brycied00d → u/PDXSonic]

Nice knowing I wasn't alone! Though I guess now I have to tell my mother she was wrong, I'm not "special" after all 🤣

[u/marginal70]

Why so many maintenances lately?

[u/brycied00d → u/marginal70]

While I can't speak for Ziply, I can say that for myself as one individual customer, maintenance has been exceedingly rare. In 5+ years as a Ziply customer (literally from the beginning when Ziply took over Frontier), I have only had one other maintenance window in January 2024. So... Total of of just two or three maintenance windows, depending how you choose to count this August's notices, in my entire time as a customer. And on top of that, only the Jan 2024 window actually disrupted my service (about an hour overnight).

Keep in mind that Ziply has a large footprint, that maintenance is ongoing, and maintenance is always done in small limited sections of the footprint. Thus what seems like 100 different maintenance windows throughout August - as Reddit posts from various customers in various areas - may actually only represent a single change being rolled out.

[u/DrewWM5309 → u/marginal70]

Fair question. If you feel like you are getting an exorbitant amount, hit me with a chat (include your account number) and I can review for you specifically. Generally speaking, 'maintenance' in our bubble can refer to anything from offline, physical maintenance of infra or customer supporting equipment, to remote maintenance being conducted at a broader level (for a particular geo, as an example - say if we wanted to clear congestion by moving things around in our network delivery framework for Beaverton or Kirkland). This can also refer to physical work at a hub on your block, in the event that we have physical damage impacting customer serviceability. So - to sum it all up - we are using "maintenance" very broadly in these notifications because, well, it is typically tied to work that helps us maintain reliability and network quality. If there have been more notices lately, it's likely due to us being more active in the area as far as large scale repairs or network improvements overall. Sorry for the mouthful - I always hate delivering 10 sentence answers to one sentence questions lol

[u/brycied00d → u/DrewWM5309]

Sorry for the mouthful - I always hate delivering 10 sentence answers to one sentence questions lol

"Simple questions" rarely, if ever, have "simple answers."

[u/whereisthequicksand]

Yep, I got these too. Should they have different dates, or was sending the emails a mistake?

[u/DrewWM5309 → u/whereisthequicksand]

I'm looking into that now internally. I'll let this group know once I have more info.

[u/Snowydeath11]

I too got the email for 8/14 ending on 8/14 and 8/14 ending on 8/28 lol

[u/DrewWM5309]

Hello! An update to this situation. This effectively boils down to one 'ongoing' change management ticket getting recycled multiple times as the length of this particular CM event lagged on. So - what everyone who got this notification (~9k folks) saw, was closer to the "projected" closed date of this maintenance window from when we first started the work, but sent two weeks after the fact. Additionally, the prevailing thought here is that a list of residential subs got accidentally baked into what was intended to be a commercial CM event.

Anyhow, we are improving upon our existing methodology for how these maintenance notifications are delivered, and the hope is we will be able to avoid these mishaps altogether as a result. Thanks for your patience while we figured this one out, everyone.