Emergency Handling Steps For Fault Recovery When Communication Between The Hong Kong Data Center And Mainland China Network Encounters A Broken Link

When the Hong Kong data center experiences a network communication loss between the Hong Kong data center and the mainland network, the operations team must quickly assess the fault scope and handle it according to established emergency procedures. This guide combines key steps such as link switching, monitoring, and collaboration with carriers to provide actionable and structured solutions to help shorten recovery time and reduce business impact.

positioning should be based on observation indicators as the first step: check monitoring alerts, packet loss rate on the link, spikes in latency, and BGP routing changes. Timely distinguish whether it is an internal server room failure, cross-border link interruption, or a key carrier issue, so as to select the appropriate emergency response strategy and party involved.

Identify the subnets, applications, and customer scopes affected by chain breaks, and categorize high-priority businesses (such as transactions, authentication, core APIs). Assess the affected geographic locations and time periods, clarifying whether there is a full-link interruption or partial routing anomaly, to guide subsequent resource allocation and prioritization decisions.

Instantly collect routing tables, traceroutes, MTR, interface statistics, syslogs, and link alarm snapshots, and save timestamps. Ensuring a complete evidence chain helps communicate with operators about identifying issues and provides raw data for subsequent fault analysis and root cause tracking.

After confirming the chain break, prioritize link switching and traffic bypass measures according to the contingency plan. Sequentially enabling backup links, adjusting BGP priorities, or temporarily scheduling traffic via CDN/proxy to ensure critical services can restore basic availability in the shortest possible time.

Uses a proven redundancy design to quickly switch to backup physical links or different operator outlets. If BGP is used, multi-point announcement/revocation of prefixes and adjustments of AS paths and Local Preferences accelerate routing convergence, ensuring the switching process can be rolled back and changes are recorded.

When the main link is unavailable, load balancing and traffic governance strategies are used to downgrade or redirect non-critical traffic to nearby nodes. Enable rate limiting and session hold policies to protect backend services and prevent avalanche effects or resource exhaustion during switchovers.

Establish and maintain communication channels with relevant operators, data centers, and interconnection partners as early as possible, and submit fault reports and diagnostic data. By clarifying fault location, impact scope, and test time window, coordinate link and routing level troubleshooting and repair for the other end.

Provides operators with collected traceroutes, BGP tables, interface error counts, and timelines to help them quickly restore fault scenarios. Using structured information (timestamps, detection points, anomalies) can significantly improve third-party response efficiency and positioning accuracy.

Agree on clear recovery window and subsequent communication frequency with all parties, and issue concise status updates to business partners, including the scope of impact, expected recovery time, and temporary handling measures. Transparent communication helps reduce business anxiety and duplicate work orders.

After fault fixing, multi-angle verification is performed: bidirectional connectivity testing, business transaction validation, performance baseline comparison, and SLA matching check. Record the entire process and write fault reports, tracing root causes and improvement measures to drive continuous optimization of redundancy, monitoring, and drills.

Summary and Recommendations: It is recommended to establish comprehensive cross-border link redundancy and BGP strategies, regularly drill chain break scenarios, and improve monitoring alerts and automated switching processes. Maintain long-term collaboration mechanisms with operators and regularly assess link health to reduce future chain disruption risks and improve fault response efficiency.