Fasthosts?

theMAD2 · 25 Jun 2006 at 19:48

Just wondered if anyone else is having problems with them at the mo? I can't access my site or theirs.

www.fasthosts.co.uk

shifty_uk · 25 Jun 2006 at 19:52

They've been down all day.

My site, my mail, everything is down.

theMAD2 · 25 Jun 2006 at 19:53

They've been down all day.

My site, my mail, everything is down.

Same here

Even their 'system status' page is down, how ironic

Berserker · 25 Jun 2006 at 19:59

UKReg is of course down too. Decided it's time to leave. 1&1 taking over = bad news.

theMAD2 · 25 Jun 2006 at 20:05

Slightly annoyed now, and worried! We're hosting several sites on Fasthosts, if this is still down tomorrow it's going to cause problems. Does anyone know how I can find out how long they will be down for? Also, how long is a piece of string?

tolien · 25 Jun 2006 at 20:06

Apparently they've managed to break all their Cisco kit, trying to deal with some "large" security issue.

Think the only way to know is phone them - but it isn't going to hurry things up is it

Berserker · 25 Jun 2006 at 20:11

Oops. Looks like they may be right about it being outside their network. I'm having trouble with other non-Fasthosts sites in the UK as well.

theMAD2 · 25 Jun 2006 at 20:12

It's much more serious than DNS.
All their BGP info (A protocol used by routers to exchange information) is missing, effectively putting them off the internet.

Don't know if that affects people outside FH as well?!?

tolien · 25 Jun 2006 at 20:16

If it's Fasthosts-specific, no. It would mean no router knows where to send traffic destined for anyone on the Fasthosts network (loosely speaking).

But if it's some universal Cisco issue, there's probably other people upgrading and breaking things too.

Beansprout · 25 Jun 2006 at 20:23

*All* of Fasthosts and UKreg is currently down. They're not even announcing their AS#, and ns1/ns2.livedns.co.uk as well as dns/dns1.fasthosts seem to be on the same server so all DNS is down. Plus, of course, everything else on the network.

I've no idea if they have other nameservers on other networks (it doesn't seem like it) but if they don't, potentially the effect is far wider than just Fasthosts, since they host DNS for countless domains which don't use Fasthosts for hosting.

That's really bad...DNS is the easiest thing to replicate so they should have redundancy on that on separate networks, esp now they're owned by 1&1... :s

Searching for fasthosts.com A record at ns1.livedns.co.uk. [213.171.192.250]: Timed out. Trying again.
Searching for fasthosts.com A record at ns2.livedns.co.uk. [213.171.193.250]: Timed out. Trying again.

Searching for ukreg.com A record at dns1.fasthosts.co.uk. [213.171.193.249]: Timed out. Trying again.
Searching for ukreg.com A record at dns.fasthosts.co.uk. [213.171.192.251]: Timed out. Trying again.

Outages happen to everyone; hopefully this outage won't be too prolonged...thousands of websites will be offline because of it

theMAD2 · 25 Jun 2006 at 20:26

Yeah, these things happen...at least it's on a Sunday I guess :rolleyes:

feenster99 · 25 Jun 2006 at 20:40

Blah, bad news. All my sites down. Going to have some unhappy customers tomorrow I think

Bet there are some tense people down in Gloucester

Matt

Berserker · 25 Jun 2006 at 20:51

Gloucester you say? Hope they weren't running fibre along the same trunk as Telewest use.

[thread]17592613[/thread]

If they were, that would certainly explain the outage. :eek:

feenster99 · 25 Jun 2006 at 20:54

Yep, they are based in Gloucester I believe. Quite funny ringing their tech support, as a few of them sound like Pirates

Matt

Beansprout · 25 Jun 2006 at 21:16

Berserker said:
Gloucester you say? Hope they weren't running fibre along the same trunk as Telewest use.

[thread]17592613[/thread]

If they were, that would certainly explain the outage.

Actually that could be the link, since Fasthosts do use Telewest

Berserker · 25 Jun 2006 at 21:21

Makes perfect sense then if that's the case.

Expect up to 24 hours of downtime then while Telewest repair rather a lot of broken fibres, and keep an eye here for service updates:

http://www.blueyonder.co.uk/status/serviceissue.do?ticket=348121

All caused by a man putting his spade/pneumatic drill/JCB in the wrong place. Mind you, despite the cost of the damage, at least it wasn't an electricity cable. That's usually fatal.

feenster99 · 25 Jun 2006 at 21:25

Going to be a lot of disrupted businesses tomorrow then if that is the case. Might be being stupid, but shouldn't there be more than one of these main cables supplying thousands of homes and businesses? If it only takes one drill to take the whole lot down, maybe there should be more than one taking a different route?

Matt

Berserker · 25 Jun 2006 at 21:34

It's called redundancy, and yes, someone as (relatively speaking) big as Fasthosts should have some. Multi-homing DNS isn't exactly expensive.

At times like this, I can be mightily smug in the fact that I never signed up for their free hosting. Like lots of things, you get what you pay for. Going to hit businesses a lot harder than it would have hit me of course.

One more reason to justify my move to 123-reg for .uk and GoDaddy for .com.

PS - from what Beansprout has just told me, it appears my guess was correct. It's definitely broken fibre and not any Cisco-related fault.

zetec452 · 25 Jun 2006 at 22:01

Its terrible that a company of that size has such a lack of redundancy.

Berserker · 25 Jun 2006 at 22:59

Another update posted two minutes ago (no, I've not been stuck on their site hitting F5, honest

)

Our engineers have located the sites of the damage to our fibre cables and have commenced work to repair this damage.

Further updates regarding areas affected and resolution details will be posted when available.

Telewest would like to apologise for any inconvenience that this issue is causing.