By Anastasia Tubanos, theWHIR.com
July 11, 2008 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — According to reports on Thursday, the website of The Financial Times (ft.com) encountered a bit of struggle after the theft of equipment at its third-party data center.
The publisher says it was unable to post new articles or update data on its site following the thefts, which took place at a Cable & Wireless colocation facility in Watford, north of London.
Currently, the FT.com website is being run on backup facilities in the US operated by SAVVIS.
It seems that initially there were rumors circulating the FT.com newsroom that servers had been stolen. However the company told ComputerWorld UK that other “equipment?” was taken instead, although what equipment specifically has been undisclosed.
“There is currently a reduced service on FT.com due to equipment being stolen over night from our third party hosted data center site,” said the company in a statement to ComputerWorld UK. “We are working with our supplier to replace the missing equipment and will restore full functionality as soon as possible.”
As for Cable & Wireless, ComputerWorld says the hosting provider has been “tight-lipped” about the break-in and wouldn’t confirm which of its customers were affected or how the theft occurred. However, the web host says it has employed a specialist engineer to minimize the loss to its customers and that the situation is being investigated by the police.
Although equipment theft and data center break-ins aren’t particularly common news, we’ve seen a few occurrences over the past few months.
In May, financial institution HSBC said it lost a server containing transaction data on 159,000 account holders from its Hong Kong branch office. The WHIR also reported that ’80s pop icon Peter Gabriel’s server was stolen from his UK hosting provider.
We have also seen at least two high-profile web hosting-related robberies in the last year. In October 2007, 20 data servers were stolen from C I Host’s Chicago facility while later in December, computing equipment was stolen from Verizon in the UK.
