On June 29 as well as July 7, Rackspace experienced power failures at their data center of 144,000 square feet in the suburbs of Dallas. The failures affected around 2,000 customers. On Tuesday, the same facility was hit with another outage.

On their official blog, Rackspace reported that they were performing some scheduled maintenance for a UPS cluster. A short occurred which caused them to lose power distribution units (PDUs) that are behind the cluster. Rackspace abandoned maintenance for the remainder of the day, rescheduling it for a future date.

The outage this week affected Cloud Sites, Rackspace’s hosting service, as well as Slicehost, provider of hosted virtual servers. Their power distribution units went down for just five minutes. However, apparently the incident caused some problems that lasted for several hours. Intermittent issues were still being reported by Slicehost at 7:09 am, with degraded performance issues still affected Cloud Sites up until 9:08 am.

A Rackspace user in a post on Twitter reported that the Dallas outage caused his websites to be down about seven hours.

Following the June and July outages, Rackspace had to pay out $2.5-3.5 million to customers in the form of service credits. At the time, Lanham Napier, Rackspace CEO, acknowledged that the outages had harmed the reputation of the company.

In July Napier said, any time there’s an incident such as this it does affect our credibility. The only way for earning it back is to execute at a very high level for a very long time.

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In a message on their GeoCities website, Yahoo stated that they had enjoyed hosting Yahoo user created websites from around the world and were proud of the community they had built, but they had decided to focus on helping their customers explore as well as build online relationships in different ways.

Yahoo stated that after Monday GeoCities wouldn’t be available and recommended that refugees of GeoCities set their new online homes up at their paid hosting service.  Yahoo has an introductory offer where the first twelve months of hosting costs only five dollars.

The shutdown of GeoCities took place a week after a report from Yahoo showed how their aggressive cost cutting had helped the company triple their net profit in spite of revenues declining by twelve percent during the third quarter.

According to Yahoo, their net profit increased by more 244 percent during the quarter, going from $186 million (13 cents a share), from last year’s $54 million (4 cents a share), which easily surpassed forecasts from analysts.

Their surprising performance was in large part due to the cost cutting measures that Carol Bartz implemented after being named to replace Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo, as chief executive in January.

During the last year, the head count of Yahoo has been reduced by around 2,000 people.  The company currently has approximately 13,200 employees.

Early this year, Yahoo announced they were planning to close down GeoCities, stating that in some areas they were increasing investment and scaling back others.

In 1994, GeoCities was formed with the name Beverly Hills Internet.  Yahoo bought the company during Silicon Valley’s infamous dot-com boom.

GeoCities provided users with tools for building interactive websites.  Chat forums and other community features were added later.

Yahoo added paid premium services, attempting to bring in revenues with GeoCities, which had difficulties keeping users and becoming profitable.

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