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Outage: Rackspace could issue up to $3.5M in customer credits

Hosting company Rackspace could end up paying between $2.5 million and $3.5 million in service credits as a result of a service outage at its Dallas data center last week. The outage was the result of "a range of power infrastructure issues," according to the company blog. To surmise, an interruption in utility power caused portions of the Dallas facility to lose power, causing swathes of customer servers to lose power and go down. The last outage there occurred in November 2007.

The company was quick to acknowledge what happened on its company blog, providing transparent and regular updates of the situation. While it has won some praise for its disclosure, the fact that Rackspace lacked the power redundancy in the first place is of definite concern and a setback for proponents of cloud computing.

Rackspace issued a statement assuring its customers: "Although we have had some issues with this data center before, please know that we will do what it takes to improve its reliability and performance."

For more on this story:
- check out this article at Network World
- check out the Rackspace blog

Related Articles:
Google apologizes, explains Gmail outage
Yikes! BlackBerry email has three-hour outage
BlackBerry outage explained
Organizations open to hotter data centers

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Comments (6) | Post a comment

Comments

Guess what! As I'm reading this email, they had YET ANOTHER POWER OUTAGE! That's right! Same as the last THREE they've had in last 30 days... except this time our main DB LOST DATA! It finally happened! Thanks, Rackspace. We will definitely be getting some of that credit...

Are you aware that Rackspace had yet ANOTHER massive outage about an hour ago, shortly before your article was posted today? They are currently in massive disarray. Our servers at Rackspace lost connectivity to the internet, Rackspace's own websites and portal went down, their phones were not being answered for 40 minutes and an hour later they have no clue as to what went wrong or how serious the problem is going forward. It would certainly seem from the nature of the problems they have been having (including hours-long failures of their hosted Exchange service which are not even in DFW) that they are not well qualified to operate a major data centre!

Gosh, this is sounding like they have some major problems on the back-end. Anyone else here who have servers that are hosted with Rackspace?

We had a brief power disruption that caused network connectivity issues for some customers. We are sorry for the problems this causes customers and we are working extremely hard to make sure we can prevent these issues in the future.

Let me know if I can be of any more assistance with your individual accounts.

Rob La Gesse
Director of Customer Development
Rackspace
210-845-4440

Why stick with refundds and get more outages?

Online Tech Offers Upgrade To Rackspace Clients

In a response to numerous power outages at Rackspace, Online Tech is offering Rackspace customers an easy transition to managed servers in its SAS-70 audited data centers.

We are 100% uptime, 0% fanatics. Call us 734-213-2020 or visit our website ot twitter at OnlineTech

“The issue here is reliability. A lot companies run their services through Rackspace. If it goes down, even for just an hour, that’s lost business.”

Online Tech prides itself on their reliability. Our data center in mid-Michigan has performed at 100% uptime in power delivery over the last 4 years running — never experiencing an outage.

We truly feel sorry for Rackspace customers. No one wants to lose business.

We are currently offering a special for Rackspace customers: $0 setup fee, one month free.

Upgrade to Online Tech.

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