RackSpace is one of the heavy hitters on the web when it comes to web hosting and data center operation. Thousands (if not millions) of websites depend on RackSpace and the hosting companies that are with them in order to serve up the webpages that we know and love around the web. At approx 3:35pm CST they posted the following to Twitter -
3:35pm CDT: we are currently experiencing an issue within our Dallas / Fort Worth data center. We are investigating the issue and will post an update momentarily.
By 4:15pm CDT they had updated Twitter a couple of times to alert people that they were aware of the issue and that it was not a power issue (unlike in November which took them offline when they were testing a power unit)
As of 4:14 PM CST, another point of clarification: This is not a power issue in DFW, all power is confirmed up and has not been down. This is a networking issue.
So while the issue itself didn’t affect Hands-on Web Hosting or our customers directly, it did have some indirect problems as some people keep their DNS with RackSpace as they promote their 100% Uptime Guarantee. So in two months, the company has received two “black eyes” and are back in the ring fighting to keep their customers happy and retain them as paying customers.
The outage not only affected their traditional web hosting offerings, but also their Cloud offering (you know, that wonderful system that everyone taunts as being the greatest thing since slice bread, and the system that has so much redundancy that it doesn’t go offline or have the same pitfalls as traditional hosting?). Granted, this would be related to their DNS and Networking Issues, but it still remains that the Cloud was OFFLINE and during the holiday season at that!
How much of an impact does this have? A lot! Many people utilized the Cloud as a storage place for blogs, images and streaming media. If you have auctions happening on eBay and your images are on RackSpace Cloud, then you had no images on your products. The ramifications of the failure are enormous! Websites like TechCrunch, 37signals, Tumblr, Laughing Squid, EventBrite and even RackSpace’s own website were all affected in the outage!
I’m sure there will be some knee-jerk reactions and people pulling accounts from RackSpace (who are known for their reliability), but that’s how the web works. The same happens when other giants such as The Planet suffer outages.
Thankfully, at this time everything appears to be working again and hopefully a full report will be released soon on just what happened and what is being done to prevent this in the future.
What are your thoughts? Did the outage affect you or your website?
The post RackSpace Datacenter Offline – half the web goes with it! appeared first on Hands-On Web Hosting.