Between 1:15pm AEST, Sunday, 1st June 2008 and 7.45pm AEST Tuesday 3rd June 2008 some clients were affected by an incident at the data centre resulting in an outage.

In summary, the electrical gear shorted, creating an explosion and fire that knocked down three walls surrounding one of our data centers’ electrical equipment room. Unfortunately our data center administrators were not allowed to activate our backup generator plan based on instructions from the fire department.

For more information on the outage, you can visit the forum for The Planet Data Center or an independent news source

For the clients hosted on the affected servers, websites were not resolving and email was also affected. No data was lost and servers were not damaged during this incident. Due to the serious nature of this incident, our System Administrators both in Sydney and in Texas actively tried to resolve the issue as their highest priority.

To resolve the issue and ensure clients are back online as quickly as possible, data was migrated on the affected machines from full backups to servers in the Sydney facility. As each backup was copied across, System Administrators then performed a machine restore and the clients/services on that machine were brought live. The seven affected servers were processed sequentially, the first was restored at 2pm AEST, 2nd June. The final server was brought live at 7.45pm AEST Tuesday 3rd June.

Some clients may be continuing to have problems with email delivery, please be assured that we are monitoring the situation and communicating with the data centre to keep abreast of the situation.

We wish to sincerely thank all affected clients for their patience during this unusual and freak occurence and apologise for any inconvenience caused.