Rackspace outage cause Getzs.com down time.
If you were shopping on Getzs.com Monday night you may have noticed that our site was not available. I would like to explain to you, our customers how a series of events caused Getzs.com to be off-line between 9:00P to 1:00A EST Monday night.
Our website is hosted by Rackspace, in it’s Dallas/Fort Worth data center. On Monday evening, a truck accident damaged the transformer that powers our data center. Backup power immediately came on as it was supposed to, and everything continued to work as it was supposed to. However the power company rightfully decided to cut power to the area in order to allow safety workers on the scene to rescue the truck driver. The power outage then caused the data center’s backup cooling system to fail. As the heat in the data center rose higher there was risk or hardware failure and permanent data loss. The Rackspace team decided to shut down some of the servers to lower the heat. Unfortunately, our server was one that was shut down, causing the Getzs.com site to go off-line.
The server was powered back up at 12:05A EST and we were able to get the site back online at 12:45A Tuesday morning. With a little bit of testing we confirmed that everything was working correctly and there was no data loss.
Our Rackspace server has never gone off-line since we have started using them as our primary hosting. We have been in contact with Rackspace and they have been completely honest about every detail that happened to cause the outage and have insured us that they will do every thing they can to prevent this sort of thing from happening again. We believe that every action they took was necessary, even though it involved shutting down our server. In effect it allowed EMTs and Firemen to safely rescue the injured driver.
We apologies to you if the outage prevented you from visiting Getzs.com on Monday night or Tuesday morning. We at Getzs pride ourselves in making you shopping experience as convenient as possible and this includes being available 24/7 all year round.
For more information on the DFW Data Center incident click here.