Sunday March 13th Alarm Dealers who use Honeywell Alarmnet Services started noticing failure to Communicate siiganls coming in at an unusala pace and not being able to log into Total Connect ad the 360 Website portal for dealers.
Alarmnet is a AT&T & Verizon Cellular and IP service provided by Honeywell which transport Burglar, Fire , Medical , Holdup , PERS and Environmental alarms signals which are routed thru their Central Station in NYC to hundreds of Central Stations across the nation.
In fact 2 Million subscribers all of a sudden around 7 Pm and sooner went down totally and completely the entire Honeywell Alarmnet was down .
The signal transportation The Total Connect Interactive system allows remote control of alarms and Honeywell comfort which remote controls Thermostats .
It was also an extremely cold weekend in the mid west and north east .
Of course no word was coming out of Honeywell what was going on . Dealers like myself started calling
and notifying customers in my case 186 Alarmnet users and Local Authorities because we had a real nightmare on our hands . They would have to call 911 and many of my sites are remote and unattended
I would not know I have an overheat a fire or burglary or possible water or oil leak.
I have many Critical Infrastructure customers I monitor including Oil Distributors and AM /FM Radio stations and a large institutional customer as well as industrial customers and Apartment buildings .
Over 1 Billion in assets and 2500 individuals my Alarmnet monitored systems are covering.
Besides me there was an even bigger concern some of our Military and Government facility are monitored thru Alarmnet as well.
there was concern this could have been a terrorist Hack and attack.
So you can understand why myself and many Fire Marshals and Officials wanted answers
Honeywell sent out hourly emails of system being down if you signed up for them but many dealers where totally unaware especially residential dealers whose systems do not test as often as Commercial systems do.
Finally Monday at 2:30 Pm Honeywell sent out a notice Alarmnet signal transport was back on line and the rest was back on by 7Pm but problems continued for a couple more days as buffers in panels started finally clearing.
They then send out an Email claiming it was all caused by the failure of Air conditioning unit overheating their server racks.
Really a single point failure caused 2 million accounts to go down.
Central stations are to have dual redundant systems up and ready to go at all times and honeywell had none of this .
Where the hell was UL on setting up and demading this facitly to be fully redundent so nothing like this happens
The big central stations have multiple monitoring sites which they can switch to and honeywell has no back up.and gives us a less than satisfactory answer.
Some claimed it was a ransom ware demand while others say it was definitely a hack there are malicious programs which can take over HVAC systems and computer servers speed up the processors and burn them up.
a simple HVAC failure sorry I am not buying t and if they where that poorly designed I will be moving all my accounts off Alarmnet .
Its time for real answers .
