Rackspace Experiences Two-Hour Power Outage

Rackspace, one of the leading managed, dedicated Web server hosts in the world, experienced a rather major power outage at their Dallas-Fort Worth (TX, USA) data center.

Around 4:15 this afternoon, our Web site at work (which is hosted by Rackspace) stopped responding to requests (at first, I was a little freaked out, because I was running a back-up and thought maybe something had gone awry). I then tried visiting the MyRackspace customer portal to submit a support ticket, and found that it was not responding, either.

I called our point of contact and asked him to look into it. Around 4:40, our Web server was back up and running. Rackspace, however, was still down for a while longer.

Rackspace is keeping customers updated on their blog. At this point, they are saying that everything is back online.

For the last two weeks, Rackspace has been performing tests, upgrades and maintenance to their back-up power utilities because of “anomalies” they’ve encountered. I wonder if this power outage was a result of those anomalies, a result of the upgrades, maintenance and testing or if it was completely unrelated.