Electron Connection Down

Your Electron system is down, and we are not getting a response from Support. None of our 30+ active electrons can connect to the particle network, but your website says it is all running fine.

Response to service tickets kind of sucks, where is the support?

How long have your Electrons been down? Is this a recent issue?

P.S. I don’t work for Particle.

It has been down for over an hour. If they are working on it I wish they would update there website and say so. Last time this happened they didn’t indicate that they even knew it was down.

We run a check every 30min to make sure we can ping a test device and it notifies us whenever they don’t go through.

Okay. I was also checking the community to see if anyone else is experiencing similar issues. I have a fleet of devices as well. My Electrons haven’t been responding. It looks like the device responses are slowly coming in.

Lucky you. I just checked some of ours in a different state and they are not responding/connected either.

Actually, I am able to ping only some of my devices. I am still not able to access the rest. I think I need to wait for a reset + cloud handshake to happen.

Do they respond to your support requests?

I haven’t reached out to support as I am still investigating the problem. I have been investigating one other issue with my code.

I am still not sure if it is a problem with the Particle cloud. status.particle.io reflects that all systems are operational.

Looks down from here. I get a fast blue blink only. Rebooting does not reconnect.

I have noticed about a 30-60 minute period before Particle sends a notice of system outage. I’m sure they need to do some testing to determine the nature of the outage before sending a communication out.

Yep that is it, and yet they say all is good on the status.

Yup. I think the devices haven’t been able to communicate since :clock1130: eastern time.

I have not had communications since 18:00 PDT. Posting this at 21:58 PDT.

Ping fails.

From the console troubleshooter:

Has this been resolve for you all, I do see an incident report on status.particle.io

As the report states the issue was a 3rd party “outage” which is beyond their scope to monitor. Particle has to rely on their partners to inform them ASAP.
While all Particle services may be fully functional (an reported as such) the “last mile” may be (and obviously was) broken but can’t be monitored by Particle any more than the respective provider allows for.

Just to assess the demand: Have you got an Uptime SLA or off-hour support contract?
If you need 24h support and/or guaranteed uptime, you can have that for some extra fee

The free tier offers standard support which is usually during office hours in Particle's time zone.
However 3rd party outages can't be prevented by that either, but the SLA would clearly state how these are handled.

Looks like Telefonica was having some network wide issues.
I am using them with non-particle SIMs and most of my Telefonica electrons were offline while others with Vodafone and T-Mobile were working fine.
Seems to be resolved now.

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Most of my Electrons seem to be reporting now. I have to check the dashboard to see if there is a missing Electron report.

Our Electrons were all down too. They all lost connection with the particle cloud around 7pm pst. Cellular was fine but all were just slow blinking cyan, not the fast blink. Everything came back four hours later at 11pm.

I wonder how that affected data usage, being able to connect to cellular but trying in vain over and over again to get to the particle cloud. This thread being the perfect opportunity to discuss how to handle this type of situation gracefully in our code and make our product better and more robust.

Just using automatic mode made all my electrons flash cyan until finally it failed with two yellow/orange flashes and then start all over again every few minutes. This eats battery power and maybe even data. Is there a better/different way to exit this situation early and save both power and data?

On my photons I scan for the desired access point and go back to sleep if it’s not there. If it is I connect and then timeout the particle connection after 15-20 seconds if the particle cloud seems unreachable. How does one scan for the cellular connection or access point using an electron?

Out of curiosity, how did you establish this?

Actually it would be better to open a dedicated thread for only that side of the issue and discuss that there.
You may link back to this thread to provide context for the question, but your specific question does not really fit the over-all content of this thread.

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@ScruffR I have to admit it was more of an assumption rather than firmly established. I based this on the fact that the electrons would start the flashing green routine which is the cellular connection and then start the flashing cyan routine. I assumed from this that the cellular connection was good but the particle cloud could not be found or reached.
I currently am not accessing any other internet services so I can’t say that something like pinging google was working.

In your opinion, am I sort of correct in that assumption?

The flashing cyan - or rather leaving flashing green - only indicates that the connection to the nearest cell tower is established, it doesn’t really tell whether any data will make it to its destination (regardless which).