Fort Erie Radio quickly recovers from brief broadcast disruption

Fort Erie Radio’s live broadcast was interrupted by a half hour of silence on Wednesday morning after a remote server failure.

While contingencies are in place to prevent silence from going out on air, Fort Erie Radio founder and program manager Brent Jones admits that no system is perfect.

“Our remote server is set up like a bit of a failsafe. It will keep our station online even if we have a local hardware failure or internet outage,” Jones said on Wednesday evening.

“But if that remote server goes down, everything goes down with it.”

When the outage occurred just before 9:15 a.m., Jones was on air with his morning show co-host, Brenda Tyrrell.

Radio.co, a tech company based in the U.K., provides hosting to more than 5,000 internet radio streams around the globe, including Fort Erie Radio.

Callum Walsh, a customer support technician for Radio.co, told Fort Erie Radio in an emailed statement that “until the issue arrived” there was nothing he or his team could do to resolve it.

“I have worked for Radio.co since the start of this year, and this is the first time I have ever seen a server issue like this occur,” said Walsh.

“All streaming servers faced a critical error,” he added. “The only positive was that we caught it straight away and resolved the issue.”

As with any live broadcast, Jones acknowledges that occasional hiccups are inevitable.

“We were back online sometime around 9:45,” he said. “It happens. Happens to terrestrial broadcasters, too.”

Earlier in September, 91.7 Giant GM and its sister station, New Country 89.1, were offline for several hours after vandals cut wires at their station transmitter site in Welland.

“We’re just glad the whole thing was sorted out pretty fast,” Jones said. “It could have been worse.”

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