Last week, Michael Jackson’s death caused sites to fail left and right. Today, it’s a very different problem. The hosting service Rackspace has been completely down for the past 30 minutes or so. Don’t believe us, just listen to Justin Timberlake or Michelle Malkin, both of which have sites on the service and took to Twitter to complain.

Apparently, it’s an entire network outage [Update below, while it was a massive outage, it wasn't a full outage, apparently.] and so the usually very responsive Rackspace team cannot even respond to emails or tweet (though I’m sure we’ll be seeing some updates from smartphones shortly). Along with sites like Timberlake’s and Malkin’s, the popular event site, EventBrite, is apparently down as well.

Update: Here’s the status from Rackspace via Twitter: “We are having an issue that is affecting part of our DFW data center. No details yet. Will update as we get more information.”

Update 2: It looks like a lot of the sites on Rackspace are finally coming back up — including Rackspace’s own site. Downtime looks to have been about an hour. And here’s the all-clear from Rackspace itself: “All power is restored to the DFW data center – all devices affected are starting to come on-line. Details to follow.”

Update 3: Rackspace officially says that only one of its nine servers were affected, but it still hit a huge number of sites. And it notes, “We owe better, and will deliver.” Well played.