Update on the Tucows Service Outages

I’m posting this here (as well as the forums on Tucows Discuss) since I know that some of our customers read this blog from time to time.

Here’s what I know — a more official notice should be coming your way shortly.

The actual applications, for the most part, continued to work.

Folks

with Blogware accounts could post to their blogs, Email Defense

continued scanning for spam and viruses, Certs kept working, Email was

queued for a little while and began processing again in the early

evening, and no mail was lost.

What stopped working during the outage: Provisioning and Management.

The

specifics are a little different for each service, but in general, it

was the ability to sell new instances of services or manage existing

ones. Blogware, being located in a different facility, was unaffected.

It’s very unusual for a redundant power system to fail like this.

The

“redundant” in “redundant power system” makes this sort of thing very

unlikely. For example, if you have two systems with a 1% probability of

failing, the probability that both will fail is one one-hundredth of 1%.

The

cause for the failure is as of yet unknown. We’re working with IBM to

identify it. Once we know, we will take steps to prevent this from

happening again and let you know what we will be doing in the future.