Major hosting outage - 123reg
Since early morning (GMT) April 16th 2016 our hosting provider 123reg has been experiencing a major outage. There was little communication on the matter and no information on the nature of the problem. It later transpired that as part of a catastrophic blunder 123-reg accidentally deleted 100’s of virtual servers.
This serious incident is hitting many businesses hard and is being covered by various major UK news channels including BBC News online.
Affected services
This means XmlSitemapGenerator.org and G-mapper.co.uk are currently offline.
This does not impact the use of our Wordpress plugin or G-Mapper software itelf.
At this time the outage has been for over 24 hours and it has been over 12 hours since we received any update. Looking at social media this seems to be affecting many 100’s if not 1000’s of customers. Some customers are reporting that this is one in a series of recent major failings.
Resolution time
We are hoping that 123reg will restore their service and we will come back online, however given the lack of information we are concerned that there has been a more catastrophic or malicious event.
In the event that services are not automatically recovered we will need to migrate to restore the service to new servers so we envisage a prolonged outage that will last a further number of days.
We will update on this as and when the situation becomes clearer.
Further updates
We know that every day 100’s of users and their websites depend on our services, so we will of course be reviewing our hosting arrangements as a result of this incident and the appalling communications from 123Reg.
We apologise for the inconvenience and we hope that service will resume soon.
To stay up to date please watch twitter and our facebook page.
Update 17:00 GMT 17th April 2016
123reg are reporting they have accidentally deleted their customers virtual servers and are talking about data being lost. They are talking about a recovery time of about 24 hours, however it remains unclear to that extent the serivce will be restored and what further work will be required.
Update 08:00 GMT 18th April 2016
It has now been 48 hours since the outage began. There is no further information from 123reg our hosting provider. Unfortunately they have not been very unhelpful in this matter and have provided very little information making it difficult to plan. We are considering alternative recovery plans.
Update 01:00 GMT 19th April 2016
We have established a temporary Virtual Server in Microsoft Azure and have now re-established our basic website albeit without SSL. We have yet to recover the key services required to operate our online sitemap generator, but we have made good progress today.
We still have a long way to go and this is big emergency migration for a very small organisation with limited resources. We apologise for any inconvenience and ask that you bear with us.
Update 20:00 GMT 19th April 2016
We have now re-established our HTTPS / SSL certificate. Our original server remains unavailable.
Update 02:00 GMT 24th April 2016
Our original servers we’re never recovered by 123-reg, however we are nearing a point where we are ready to go live again with our online sitemap generator. We should have more news in the next day or so.