Major Outage at our Broadcasting Service Provider

[admin]

From Doug Erwin at The Planet where ATCMonitor's broadcast server is located at:

This [Saturday May 31] evening at 4:55pm CDT in our H1 data center, electrical gear shorted, creating an explosion and fire that knocked down three walls surrounding our electrical equipment room. Thankfully, no one was injured. In addition, no customer servers were damaged or lost.

We have just been allowed into the building to physically inspect the damage. Early indications are that the short was in a high-volume wire conduit. We were not allowed to activate our backup generator plan based on instructions from the fire department.

This is a significant outage, impacting approximately 9,000 servers and 7,500 customers. All members of our support team are in, and all vendors who supply us with data center equipment are on site. Our initial assessment, although early, points to being able to have some service restored by mid-afternoon on Sunday. Rest assured we are working around the clock.

We are in the process of communicating with all affected customers. we are planning to post updates every hour via our forum and in our customer portal. Our interactive voice response system is updating customers as well.

There is no impact in any of our other five data centers.
I am sorry that this accident has occurred and I apologize for the impact.

Not much we can do at this time.. by the time I provision another broadcast server and get it online, ThePlanet will hopefully have this data center back online.

We apologize for the inconvenience. This is obviously a major outage at one of the world's largest service providers for dedicated servers.

Thankfully, our web servers for our entire company are in another data center which is online and working fine this morning. You can stay updated with the latest information via http://forums.theplanet.com/index.php?showtopic=90185.