Rackspace, world’s major dedicated server hosting provider suffers severe outage for hours

Rackspace, one of the MAJOR dedicated server hosting providers of the world, went down severely for more than an hour yesterday, resulting in with many popular websites going down like eventbrite.com, Timberlake’s blog, Malkin’s blog and etc. As Rackspace was found quoting,

We are having an issue that is affecting part of our DFW data center. No details yet. Will update as we get more information.

But even with that, people are asking why was there a single point failure (SPF) for something as big as Rackspace. Apparently one out of Rackspace’s nine global datacenters went down, which still consists of a scary number of websites having suffered the unexpected breakdown from a sevice that promises 100% uptime. The outages also affected the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) cluster hosted by Rackspace, apparently making e-commerce and other functions that depend on SSL inoperable for Rackspace-hosted sites

As PCMag informs us,

Officially, Rackspace acknowledged several outages. Sometime Monday afternoon Central Time, part of one of Rackspace’s nine data centers suffered a power outage, and then was brought back online around 5:30 PM Central Time. Until about 8:58 PM Central Time, that portion of the data center, in Dallas-Fort Worth, was transitioning between generator and utility power, Rackspace said on its official blog

Very predictably, Justin Timberlake couldn’t help but ridicule the whole situation,

Rackspace at this time, probably have sorted out the problem as they write from their official blog,

We are currently experiencing issues with our SSL cluster in our DFW data center.  We are aware of the issue and are working to quickly resolve it. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. We will continue to update this status post as we have more information. To reconfirm: Only sites hosted in DFW with SSL are currently affected.  If you have any questions or concerns please contact our support via live chat or at 1-877-934-0407 international +1.210.581.0407.

UPDATE: At 9:48 PM CDT, connectivity issues were recently reported and were quickly resolved to the SSL cluster in our DFW data center. We greatly appreciate your patience and apologize for the issue.

Here is the confirmation

Even Robert Scoble, who very publicly adopted Rackspace the other day, suffered the same fate we guess and he also made it a point to make people aware of the Rackspace Outage. We will soon follow it up with a more technical aspect of why and how it happened. So, watch this space.