Date: March 31, 2005

The Planet UPS Failure, no client communication

The Planet, www.theplanet.com, had a major problem with thier UPS systems feeding part of their datacentre, causing a large section of the network to go offline, including all staff PCs and their own websites. During this downtime they did not communicate with their clients until hours passed, even then they barely told us anything, as we found being a customer of The Planet.

The downtime was estimated at 6 hours for many clients, some longer. Phase 2 of the D2 data center was mainly affected and a very sporadic small amount of servers were affected at D4 purely due to routing issues through D2. D5 has shown no down time due to this problem. With hundreds of furious customers frantic of not knowing what was happening, because ThePlanet.com, ServerMatrix.com and all their other sites including the client area, Orbit, were all offline, a massive thread starting to apprear on WebHostingTalk.com http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=390336 The thread has grown to a massive 93 pages at the time of this article being published.