Users rage as Fasthosts virtual servers go titsup... again
'What on Earth did you do?'
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Webhosting company Fasthosts has been hit by a severe outage that has seen the collapse of its virtual servers.
The systems fell down early this morning and even though engineers worked frantically to restore services, some users are still reporting problems.
In an announcement on its website at 9.36 BST, Fasthosts said: "A number of customers will currently be experiencing degraded service on the VPS platform following complications during overnight maintenance. Specialist engineers are currently engaged in resolution of this issue and further information will be provided as it becomes available."
Subsequent updates confirmed that these engineers were working hard to fix the issue. However, after identifying the "root cause" of the problem, Fasthosts' techies warned that even if they did fix the problem, users would experience "degraded performance issues" for several hours.
The latest post, written at 15:19, read:
We are working hard to reactivate all remaining servers. Servers that are brought back online will continue to experience degraded performance for the next few hours until the work is complete. Please accept our apologies for the on-going disruption during this time.
The firm's Twitter feed was full of frantic posts, showing the firm's tech support staff reassuring people they are working on the problem. Anyone with a problem was told that engineers would use the the time-honoured tradition of turning individual servers off and then on again to get them up and running.
Customers were raging at the outage. Here are a few of the tweets:
@fasthosts @fhtechteam Our VPS has been down now for nearly 6 hours that we know of. What on earth did you do!? Will be seeking compensation
— chris bond (@cbondie) June 12, 2013
@fhtechteam My clients WP sites are still showing 'Error establishing database connection' please advise, 4 hours now!
— Karen Davis (@chickenegg_kd) June 12, 2013
Fasthosts is no stranger to slip-ups. It accidentally deleted customers' emails during a botched upgrade in 2007 and only half of them were subsequently restored. ®
