Last.fm Down, London Data Center Overheats

The streaming music hub Last.fm was offline for about 6 hours Sunday after multiple chillers failed in its London data center, causing a dramatic rise in temperature inside the data center. The temperature in one row of racks reached 50 degrees C (122 degrees F), according to a chart posted by Last.fm of conditions at its Braham Street data center, which is operated by Level 3 Communications. UPDATE: The Last.fm site is back up as of about 8:30 pm Eastern time.

Last.fm kept its users updated with a series of whimsical posts on its Twitter feed. "Crikey, one of our data centers has overheated! We're fixing it as fast as we can, but the site will be down for a bit," read one Tweet. "Apologies for the downtime, our datacenter appears to have landed on the sun," read another. It's not clear whether the thermal event affected other customers, but Level 3's facility also hosts many telecom providers, hosting companies and enterprise firms that would be less amused by a lengthy outage.

TechCrunch noted that Last.fm had recent touted its uptime on Twitter and Flickr. Murphy must have noticed.