Is there a current problem with Usenet?

[#1]

Both yesterday and today I've had very patchy connection to Usenet, with brief periods where everything was OK and much longer ones with no connection at all.  As I type this (19:14 on Sunday 24th November) the service is down.

Since my setup is working properly some of the time, I suspect that the problem doesn't lie at my end - but can anyone please confirm that?

I'm using Thunderbird 128.3 running on a Windows 10 desktop PC.  The email side of the program is fine, even when the Usenet connection is down.

Many thanks.

[#2]

I haven't used or tried usenet in many a year, but I successfully telneted to port 119 using hostname usenet.plus.net and got a reply from giganews.

(I'm on a fullfibre connection, and any info relating to usenet for that sort of account doesn't easily appear on the PN website)

I did however stumble over a bit of the community website that appears to not be linked into the forums. Plenty of broken weblinks there IMO.

https://community.plus.net/t5/Library/bg-p/library

"USENET continues to be a popular place for veteran Internet users"

[#3]

"USENET continues to be a popular place for veteran Internet users"

From a 2015 post?

[#4]

Grumble, thanks for that.  So perhaps the fault is at my end, though I can't think what it might be, given that I changed nothing between the bouts of the connection working and it not working.  More investigation is required, clearly.

[#5]

As of this morning, it's working again.

[#6]

...But not for long.  On-again, off-again several times today.

[#7]

Quelle surprise!

[#8]

I successfully telneted to port 119 using hostname usenet.plus.net and got a reply from giganews. Again.

But that's just me.

[#9]

It turned up on a web search.