Power Outage in Hostway’s Chicago Data Center Impacts DNS Service for Some Customers

logo-WHIR

This article originally appeared at The WHIR

Web hosting provider Hostway has experienced a localized power failure in its Chicago data center that is impacting DNS service for some of its customers, according to a message on Twitter by the company on Monday afternoon. Nearly half of its affected customers are back online as of 4 pm ET, about an hour and a half after the company first reported the issue.

According to Hostway’s Twitter, technicians were on site as of 3:27 pm ET and have restored a portion of the impacted services. Hostway started to report issues at 2:33 pm ET on Twitter.

The company said it will post an update every 15 minutes on Twitter and on its blog until it restores service completely.

For web hosts communicating outages or service issues with customers, being up front about your communication plan is a good idea. Transparency is key during outages as it builds trust with your users, and letting them know specifically when they can expect updates is an easy way to be in touch with your customers.

Hostway explained that the issue started with one of its three uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) “which caused a critical fault and triggered safety breakers.”

“Bypassing the affected systems could have resulted in electrical damage to impacted servers,” Hostway said in a tweet.

The WHIR has reached out to Hostway for a comment and will update the story when we hear back.

This first ran at http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/power-outage-in-hostways-chicago-data-center-impacts-dns-service-for-some-customers