Major Outage at Fasthosts

Many dedicated server customers at Fasthosts are offline today due to a hardware failure in a core network switch. The downtime is the latest in a series of performance problems at Fasthosts, one of the largest UK hosting providers. In December a system-wide password reset caused problems for Fasthosts customers, many of whom found their websites disabled when they couldn't access databases or control panels. The reset was prompted by an earlier security incident. Fasthosts also had extended outages in July 2007 and June 2006. Fasthosts was acquired by 1&1 Internet in May 2006.

The details of the incident appear similar to an outage at Globat in February, in which a switch failure knocked all the company's services offline for eight hours. In response, the company said it would purchase a backup switch to create an automated failover option.

Here's the statement the company provided to The Register: