Salt Fiber Down Nationwide — A Friday Night Outage Story
Dictated by Brocasm and corrected and translated by mistral-14b
TL;DR
On Friday, May 15, Salt’s fiber network went down across Switzerland. My automated monitoring caught it at 18:55. I switched to a 5G backup on another carrier in minutes. Here’s what happened, how I handled it, and a few lessons on infrastructure resilience.
🔔 The Alert
I was in the middle of a normal evening when my monitoring stack pinged: “Salt fiber — connectivity lost.”
Timestamp: 18:55 Swiss time.
A quick glance at X confirmed it — I wasn’t alone. People across the country were reporting the same issue. Salt’s mobile support site was already slowing down under the load. International phone support? Let’s not even go there 😅
Update: Swisscom and Sunrise users also reported issues, but it turns out these were rebound effects rather than a shared backbone problem. When Swisscom customers couldn’t reach Salt numbers, they naturally assumed their own provider was down too. As Armin Schaedeli, Swisscom spokesperson, explained:
“We did observe a slight disruption on our network around 6:30 PM, but it doesn’t explain the scale of the outage. When our subscribers try to call Salt customers and the call doesn’t go through, they naturally think the problem is with Swisscom — which isn’t the case.”
This was a Salt-specific incident that rippled outward through inter-operator calls — a butterfly effect of network interdependence.
Two hours into the outage, I checked Salt’s official network status page. It still displayed: “All services are operating normally” — which means their status page is less reactive than my $5 monitoring stack 😅
For real-time network status across Swiss providers, alle-störungen.ch aggregates outage reports from multiple operators.
🛟 The 5G Failover
This is exactly the kind of scenario why I maintain a backup connection.
Within a couple of minutes, I switched my home network to a 5G router on another carrier. It’s not fiber-grade throughput, but for messaging, browsing, and keeping my services alive, it did the job.
What worked well:
- Automated alerts meant I knew about the outage before I noticed anything myself
- Having a pre-configured 5G backup device ready to go
- The switchover was manual but fast — no complex reconfiguration needed
What could be better:
- True automatic failover would be ideal (dual-WAN router with health checks)
- 5G backup is a stopgap, not a replacement for fiber
🤔 Friday 19:00 on a Long Weekend
The timing is… poetic. Friday evening. 7 PM. The start of a long weekend.
It makes you wonder: did someone push a “small harmless change” to the network before heading off for the weekend? We’ve all seen it happen. That deployment at 17:45 on a Friday that everyone holds their breath for.
I genuinely feel for the Salt engineers on call tonight. Weekend incidents are the worst — no matter how well you prepare, it always hits at the worst possible moment. Respect to those working to restore service 🍻
📡 Resilience Lessons
This incident reinforces a few principles I try to live by:
| Principle | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Monitor everything | If you don’t know it’s down, you can’t react. My alerts fired before I noticed any slowdown. |
| Have a fallback | Whether it’s dual-WAN, 4G/5G failover, or a simple mobile hotspot — test your backup before you need it. |
| Communicate | In an outage, silence is worse than bad news. Salt’s mobile support site struggled under load — a common failure pattern when traffic spikes at exactly the wrong moment. |
| Expect the unexpected | Nationwide outages are rare, but they happen. Plan accordingly. |
💭 Final Thoughts
Outages are frustrating, but they’re also the best teachers. My monitoring stack proved its worth tonight. My 5G fallback strategy validated itself.
And honestly? There’s something comforting about knowing your setup can take a hit and keep running.
To everyone impacted tonight: hang in there. To the Salt teams on-site: you’ve got my sympathy.
Good night, and may your connections stay stable 🍻
🔗 Related
This article was written after the Salt fiber outage on May 15, 2026. I’ll update it if more details emerge about the root cause.