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

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