Updated Gaffe-prone web hosting outfit Fasthosts has suffered another major outage today, this time taking down many of its customers' dedicated servers.

Multiple Reg readers report that websites and services hosted by the Gloucester outfit went titsup in the early hours of this morning.

A status message posted by Fasthosts at 2.59am stated:

Some dedicated server customers may currently find their servers are unavailable at present. Affected customers may not be able to access their server, eRIC or Backup spaces and may also affect the rebuild of deployed servers and the deployment of new servers.
Engineers are continuing their investigations as a priority.

An update posted at 11am said the problems were continuing, and that fixing it is the firm's top priority.

One of our correspondents said this would be the last straw for his company's relationship with Fasthosts, however. "It's fun and games here today as one of our Fasthosts servers runs our premium web app and the other, our email. Although, hopefully not for much longer," he wrote.

We've contacted Fasthosts' reps for comment on this latest meltdown and will update this story as soon as they get back to us.

Fasthosts, owned by German group 1&1 Internet, mostly competes at the budget end of the hosting market. Last year it angered hundreds of customers by resetting all their passwords with no warning, following a security breach. The resulting chaos lasted for weeks. ®

Update

Here's a statement we received from Fasthosts at 1.07PM:

A number of Fasthosts dedicated server customers have experienced network connectivity issues this morning as a result of an unexpected hardware failure in one of our core network switches. The fault resulted in an outage of a number of dedicated servers within the affected network segment early this morning.

Fasthosts engineers are working speedily to bring all affected servers back online, a large proportion of which have been rectified throughout this morning.

Fasthosts will make every effort to ensure that affected servers are returned to normal as swiftly as possible. We apologise to affected customers for any concern or inconvenience caused.

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