Urgent network outage at 1700 today 26 May

With apologies for the very short notice: this will affect access to JASMIN and CEDA services:

Due to an ongoing technical issue with the main RAL firewalls, there is going to be a period of network disruption from 17:00 today. We apologise for the very short notice but are passing on the information to you now that we have been made aware of the potential impact.

This essential work is being performed by the RAL core networking team and specialist contractors and unfortunately cannot be postponed or rescheduled.

There are two possible outcomes for the work at 17:00, it is hoped that we will only see a 5 minute outage at 17:00, followed by some minor, short lived interruptions approximately 15 minutes later. The less hopeful scenario could result in the network being unavailable for 30+ minutes whilst the original firewall is restored from backup.

Thank you for your patience & understanding.