Commenters in a message thread on forum DigitalPoint said the service began experiencing trouble late Wednesday night. Many reported their sites going offline completely Thursday morning.

Posters reported busy signals when trying to reach the company by phone - not an unusual result during a major outage, due to the flood of incoming phone calls.

Late in the morning, participants in the DigitalPoint thread began reporting that they had gotten through to Globat. Initially reported a “hardware failure in the data center” and estimated that Web systems would be back up in approximately five hours.

At about the same time, customers began reporting that their email was back online.

Around 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time, users said domain servers that had previously been unreachable had come back online. And other users began reporting that their sites had come online as the afternoon progressed.

Globat’s own site appears to have come back online somewhere shortly before 6:00 p.m. and is now running normally.

One of the most interesting aspects of the outage was certainly the use of the forum to disseminate information about the outage. Many of the posters on the thread said they were new to the forum, and had come across it via a “Globat down” Google search.

A poster in the forum said “My contact there told me that he's going to do a full blog post once the down sites are back up,” so Globat customers can probably anticipate that a more complete explanation of the outage is forthcoming.