Updated Pipex's hosting service 123-Reg suffered a weekend of downtime thanks to broken hardware.

The Reg received emails from many of those hit. One said: "Nameservers have been down for 48+ hours this weekend, loosing [sic] me around £3k across my four more popular domain names.

"No explanation on there [sic] website as to what caused the problems. Bloody ridiculous."

One poster on a hosting bulletin board complained: "The most upsetting thing is that there is NO way to get hold of them... they make you wait an hour and dont answer the phone... they dont answer tickets."

A spokesman for Pipex, which owns 123-Reg, told us the company saw its domain name servers fail on Friday afternoon and got them back online on Sunday morning. He said: "Yes there have been problems relating to domain name servers - we've got new hardware in place now and things should be working fine." The company promised a statement on the problems soon.

123-Reg last suffered problems as a result of the floods in Sheffield in June. In December 2006 it had email problems which it blamed on an unexpectedly large amount of image-based spam.

We'll update this story with 123-Reg's statement when we receive it.

123-Reg sent us the following statement:

123-reg experienced intermittent performance issues on its DNS servers between late afternoon on Friday 16 November and Sunday 18 November. This meant that some customers have encountered difficulties with their domain names during this period.

This problem was caused by a combination of excessive loading on the DNS servers and a rare hardware failure. During this time, 123-reg engineers have replaced the hardware and full service has been resumed.

We apologise to our customers for the inconvenience that the outage would have caused and we have begun an investigation to identify the cause of the failure, and any necessary actions required will be implemented without delay. Further information and updates is available from http://www.hosting-status.pipex.net

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