(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — According to a report published Thursday in The Register, a network performance issue affected the services of the email customers of UK-based web host Fasthosts (www.fasthosts.co.uk) Thursday, for approximately two hours.
The report says a problem with the company’s BlueArc storage system affected email customers during the period between 8:15 a.m. and 10:10 a.m. GMT.
A Fasthosts statement quoted in the Register article says the storage system problem resulted in “intermittent access” for “some” of the company’s customers, and that service returned for most customers sooner than the 10:10 a.m. time reported by the Register, which was the longest outage.
The Register, however, says its conversations with customers would seem to indicate that the outage persisted for the duration of that period.
Its report quotes several customers expressing their concerns about the quality of the service – never a difficult thing to find in the wake of a performance outage – as well as the quality of the communication during the period of downtime.
The report, which seems intended to call out Fasthosts, focuses particularly on the fact that the outage follows another recent period of email downtime – as well as others over the summer – that took place on November 24, and lasted “the better part of the day.” At the time, the outage was blamed on a firmware problem with the BlueArc system.
At the time, on November 26, Fasthosts reported that BlueArc was developing a patch for the bug, that was expected to be tested and deployed “over the coming days.”
The Register quotes the Fasthosts statement from Thursday as saying “we have added additional capacity and monitoring for our mail services since the last BlueArc related outage and are awaiting the permanent firmware fixes from BlueArc.”
The statement also apologizes for the outage and says the company is continuing to make infrastructure investments intended to mitigate the chance of outages.
About Liam Eagle
Liam Eagle has worked as a contributor to the Web Host Industry Review since its inception in 2000, and as editor since 2003. He has been editor of the WHIR's print magazine since its launch. His daily involvement in the gathering and reporting of Web hosting news and his regular interaction with Web hosting leaders gives him an uncommonly broad appreciation of the issues and tends facing the business. Through his WHIR blog, Liam spots Web hosting trends and offers opinions on the industry-wide impacts of major developments and the motivation behind big announcements. Follow him on Twitter @liameagle
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