Rackspace Suffering Multiple Outages in their Cloud Sites

On Tuesday, Rackspace suffered yet another failure to their data center, causing outages for their cloud computing customers. The incident was their third since late June.

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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