Network Outage at The Planet update from May 2010

When you're one of the largest web hosting companies, even an outage on a Sunday night gets widely noticed. The Planet was offline for about 90 minutes overnight, affecting the operations of many customers housed in its Houston data centers.

UPDATE: As of 9:30 a.m. Eastern time, customers are reporting that they are offline again. Some are expressing frustration at the lack of status updates on The Planet's Twitter feed. The only company update about the overnight outage appeared on the company forums, which are now offline.

UPDATE 2: As of 10:20 a.m. it appears most customers of The Planet are back online. "While many services have been restored, our network team continues to investigate and work on the remaining issues," The Planet posted in a Twitter update. "We believe the network issues this morning are unrelated to connectivity problems customers in H1 & H2 may have experienced around 12am CDT.  Our initial analysis shows that a circuit between Dallas and Houston caused the ~8 a.m. CDT network disruption, and it has been repaired."

Here's the incident report on the overnight outage:

"On May 2 at approximately 11:45 p.m. Central time, we experienced a network issue that affected connectivity within The Planet’s core network in Houston that may have prevented your servers from communicating to the Internet," the company reported on its customer forum. Network connectivity service was fully restored in less than 85 minutes; however, your servers may have been impacted by this incident.

"We determined that one of four border routers in Houston failed to properly maintain standard routing protocols," the company reported. "Traffic destined for this router may have experienced a failure to communicate within The Planet’s core network and to several Internet transit providers directly connected to this border router. We are working through a root cause analysis and we’ve isolated this router from our network to prevent further issues."