Status-Q

My thanks to Terence Eden, who recently reposted on Mastodon the fact that Google are shutting down their ‘goo.gl’ URL-shortener in a month’s time.  

URL shorteners are those services that take long URLs and turn them into shorter ones by maintaining a database mapping the latter to the former.  Tinyurl.com was perhaps the first; bit.ly is another one.  They can be handy as a temporary way to send someone a more manageable link, but you shouldn’t rely on them for anything important or long-term.  

Even if they don’t come from a company that has Google’s reputation for killing things off, it’s worth remembering that any URL that you don’t control yourself is dependent on at least one other person or organisation.  The more proxies and the more third parties invoved in getting to the content, the less likely it is that somebody in the future will be able to use the link successfully.  

My blog is over 24 years old now, and it’s a salutory thought that the average lifespan of companies even on the S&P 500 is only about 15 years.  Even if a big company doesn’t cancel its shortening service, it may be cancelled itself before too long!  I’ve just replaced the two ‘goo.gl’ links in my past posts and, though I’m glad to see that tinyurl.com is still going strong and outliving the S&P average, I’ve replaced most of those too.

However, it’s not always that easy to replace them.  As Terence points out, a vast number of academics have been unfortunate or unwise enough to use ‘goo.gl’ links in hundreds of thousand of citations in PDF papers… and they’ll all stop working by the end of August.  The one ray of light here is that the ever-wonderful Internet Archive Wayback Machine seems to remember where those links pointed to when it last scanned them.  So if you’ve used a goo.gl link anywhere important, you might want to check whether it has been captured.

In general, though, remember that the only URLs you can be confident have a long-term future are the ones you control and preserve yourself!

Readers in the UK will be familiar with the ‘EE’ mobile network operator, and those with a long memory may recall that its original name was ‘Everything Everywhere’.  Well, that’s just what they have been failing to provide today.

I spent a happy few hours today trying to work out why my mother’s phone wasn’t able to make or receive calls. It’s a difficult thing to diagnose remotely, so, after the first hour, I drove an hour down the road to her house to carry on the investigation.  

Eventually, after checking all the possible mobile-service-related settings on the iPhone, restarting, rebooting, turning airplane mode on and off — you know the routine — I started experimenting with swapping SIMs with my Vodafone one, and found that her EE SIM could only call landlines and not other mobiles. Eventually I came to the conclusion that it had to be something related to her actual mobile account or connection.    

Had she run out of credit or minutes or something?   Why, in that case, couldn’t she receive calls either? I logged into her EE account — no issues reported there.  Installed their app — nothing reported there.  They had a web page where you could check for any known issues in your area — all showing a happy, green status.  I’m embarrassed to admit that I still have a Twitter account, so I looked at ‘@EE’: nothing posted there either… for a year or more.  

Because the key thing you really want to know at this stage is, “Is it only me? Is anybody else seeing this?  Could it actually be an issue not related to my account or my equipment?”

And then I searched Twitter for what other people were saying about ‘@EE’.  And that’s when I discovered that no, we most certainly were not alone!  There were huge numbers of people suffering from the same issues.  And gradually, other websites like TechRadar started to report on what was happening, mostly initiated by the reports on DownDetector.

It turns out that it’s not just EE: Vodafone and Three have been having problems today too:

So it’s a pretty nationwide problem.  

But try finding any reference to it on the websites of any of these companies!  I couldn’t.  In fact, it’s pretty hard to find a proper support page at all.    I have both Vodafone and EE SIMs myself, yet has anybody notified me that there might be problems?  Not a squeak.

All they need is a banner at the top of their website saying, “Sorry, some customers are experiencing problems with their mobile service at present. We’re working on it!”  That would have saved me a couple of hours of driving and a couple of hours of troubleshooting today.  But when companies get to a certain size, they stop caring about communicating with their users, and the marketing departments have more clout than the customer support departments.  Cory Doctorow has a word for this.

Of course, it may also be that companies over a certain size have so much bureaucracy in place relating to their online presence that they can’t actually make quick changes to their website to respond to issues in a timely fashion!

So I’m going to start paying more attention to sites like DownDetector.  It would be a source of distress to me if I had to depend on Twitter(X) for anything these days.

And another thing occurred to me. This was, I think, only an issue with routing traditional phone calls between networks.  (That’s not a trivial problem; I can remember, for example, when you could only send SMS texts to people who were on the same network as you were.  I’m much less concerned that the networks had technical challenges than I am that they did such an appalling job with customer communication when it happened.)   But here’s the thing:  I don’t think you would have been affected if you were making your calls with FaceTime.   Or Signal. Or if you’d made that Faustian bargain and used WhatsApp.  (And, possibly, even if you’d enabled Wifi calling and used your normal number routed over the internet.)  People under 35 probably barely noticed.

No, this particular outage affected those making traditional phone calls in the traditional way.  And I wonder for how much longer that’ll be an issue?