Rackspace Goes Down. Again. Takes The Internet With It. Again.

Screen shot 2009-11-02 at 11.48Another day, another Rackspace outage. The hosting company had a complete and total failure today that took down a number of big sites on the Internet, including ours. This has been happening all too often in recent months, including downtime just last month.

The failure apparently originated in the company’s Dallas-area server farm. But unlike previous times, this does not appear to be a power issue, the company says. Some other sites that are currently affected include: 37signals, Brizzly, Scoble’s blog, all of the sites hosted by Laughing Squid, Tumblr custom domains, and many others.

This is another black eye for the company, though they are generally responsive with other issues we’ve had throughout our time with them. But until they can prove to be more reliable, we’ve decided to get a backup version of TechCrunch up and running at another datacenter, for when someone inevitably trips over a power cord at the Dallas Rackspace center again.

Here’s a few updates from the company:

As of 3:45 PM CST, we are currently experiencing an issue within our Dallas / Fort Worth data center.  We are investigating the issue and will post an update momentarily.

UPDATE: As of 3:55 PM CST, to clarify: This is a networking issue affecting Cloud Sites in our DFW data center.

UPDATE: As of 4:05 PM CST, networking engineers are quickly working to address this issue.  We should have a resolution shortly.

UPDATE: As of 4:14 PM CST, another point of clarification: This is not a power issue in DFW, all power is confirmed up and has not been down.  This is a networking issue.