Lengthy Downtime for Fasthosts

Many sites hosted at Fasthosts, one of the UK's largest hosting providers, were unavailable for about 9 hours Sunday. Fastshosts hosts approximately 560,000 hostnames. The outage knocked out Fasthosts' own site, along with customers including Net4Now, which attributed the problems to a fiber cut at Telewest/BlueYonder. The fiber cut also affected cable TV service to about 100,000 UK subscribers who lost their signal just prior to the start of Sunday's World Cup soccer game, in which England defeated Ecuador 1-0.

Net4Now wondered how a fiber cut at a single connectivity provider could affect so many sites, given Fasthosts' statement that "every server enjoys a fully redundant Tier 1 connection so our customers never experience slow-down or service interruptions." The outage can be seen in this chart of the uptime for Fasthosts' main web site:

A dynamically updating chart of Fasthosts' web site performance is available.

Netcraft measures and makes available the response times of fifty leading hosting providers' sites. The performance measurements are made at fifteen minute intervals from six separate points around the internet, and averages are calculated over the immediately preceding 24 hour period. Netcraft also offers a web site performance monitoring service that provides detailed uptime charts, along with e-mail alerts when an outage occurs.