Globat Outage
Ben R. Neumann, CEO of web host, Globat.com described Thursday’s “nightmare” outage as follows:
At approximately 5:00am Pacific Time on Thursday, February 21, 2008 we suffered a major network outage, which effected nearly all Globat.com customers, our own Web sites and service infrastructure as well as our phone systems.
Our primary network switch in our main datacenter in downtown Los Angeles failed completely and despite tremendous efforts by our technical emergency response team could not be brought back online. This switch is a major brand name piece of equipment and as such it contains internal redundancy. We were able to switch over to the back up circuitry and begin bringing the system back online at which time, for yet unknown reasons, the entire devise, including backup system, failed completely.
More about what steps were taken to get things back to normal as well as preventative measures.
May 20th, 2008 at 4:46 am
After their CEO promised that such an event wouldn’t happen again, the Globat service is currently suffering another major outage (2008/5/19-20). I could not access my site last night, and 10 hours later, still cannot. I asked the support guys if they had redundant servers, and the answer was “no”. I asked them if they had a service status web page that I could monitor, and again the answer was “no”. I then asked them for an ETA to service resumption, and the reply was “no given ETA at this moment”, only that they would email customer when the service was back up. So I’m left in the dark with a non-existant service, and no idea when it’s going to be back.
Come on Mr Neumann, I think you should be able to do a little better than that, and when this episode is over, take a long hard look into your chief system/network admin’s eyes, and ask him if the network is really up to the job.