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Fasthosts' week to forget: 4-day virtual server summer bummer

VPS blinkenlights dim for some of the customers

Fasthosts hasn’t exactly draped itself in glory during this week of the summer solstice, what with the four day blackout of its virtual private server service and a partial eclipse of webmail.

The lights of the VPS went off on Monday evening as “system issues” with the storage platform on two VS clusters showed up and persisted after storage drive reconstruction, an update to customers - seen by us - stated.

On day two, Fasthosts techies ran a proprietary disk repair process against the storage aggregate and tried to bring the VPS back to life on the backup storage. It also started migrating VPS server onto a newer cluster.

This work continued through the night into Wednesday and onto Thursday when some customers also began experiencing “intermittent problems when accessing their mailboxes via an email client and webmail”, the company told customers.

Simon Yeoman, UK general manager at Fasthosts, claimed the VPS outage had affected a “relatively small amount of customers” but added “we do recognise that disruption of this nature causes a lot of inconvenience”.

He told The Register the majority of customers had migrated to an alternative platform, and that “multiple desk failures” was the cause.

“At the moment we are concentrating on restoring services, it's not right to comment with our engineers undertaking a post-incident review.”

Credit notes will be discussed with customers on a case-by-case basis, though most customers would have preferred to have received the services they paid for.

On the mailbox wobble, Yoeman said the “disruption” was “fully and quickly resolved. Normal service has resumed but we haven’t concluded the investigation into the root causes.” ®

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