Peer 1 Hosting struck by outage

Customers criticise 'deafening silence' after not receiving notification

Peer 1 Hosting has come under fire from some customers after it suffered an outage.

On Saturday at 5:50am, the hosting firm took to Twitter to announce it had been hit by the problem.

It said it would "provide an update as soon as we have more information", but this did not satisfy some customers, who said the issue had been going on for hours before the formal announcement.

"Only just noticed? Multiple locations and datacentres were down two hours ago, as well as your own websites," said one Twitter user.

Another said: "It was almost two hours ago. Not sporadic, but totally down. Are you back for good or should we be waiting for intermittency?"

Peer 1 is a US-based hosting and colocation company with datacentres in Portsmouth and Croydon.

One source told CRN that the Peer 1 Hosting support portal and phone lines were affected by the outage, meaning customers were unable to raise tickets about the issue. They added that customers have since received no notifications or updates, which chimes with some of the reaction on Twitter at the time.

"Still no update. The silence is deafening," said one Twitter user. Another said: "Two hours between tweets is not 'providing updates as soon as we have more information'."

The firm did take to Twitter once the problem was resolved.

At 8:10am – just over two hours after it first announced it was having difficulties – Peer 1 tweeted: "Connectivity has been restored across the Peer 1 network. All customers should be now be back online."

One Peer 1 Hosting partner who spoke to CRN on the condition of anonymity said he was notified by the vendor about the outage and because it was a weekend, the downtime was less of a problem.

"If I was concerned that it was a significantly long delay, as in days, I would have done a lot more digging," he said. "It was an issue which happened on the weekend which was fixed on the weekend. It happened outside working hours rather than the nine-to-five working week. The one thing I would say about Peer 1 is their customer service is good and their communication is good."

Rumours circulated that the outage was the result of a DDOS attack from Russia, but Peer 1 disputed this.

"We can confirm that we did experience network instability on Saturday 10 October, which affected some of our customers," it said. "Network connectivity was restored to all customers within a few hours and the root cause has been rectified. The network outage was not the result of any security compromise."