'We're at the end of this now', says UKFast CEO after datacentre outage

Manchester-based hosting firm faces backlash as customers continue to suffer from outage

Manchester-based hosting firm UKFast was this evening scrambling to restore services in one of its datacentres after an outage, with CEO Lawrence Jones telling CRN the issues should be resolved soon.

UKFast this morning confirmed a "power outage" at its Manchester datacentre, before saying that power had been restored at just after 11am.

Further updates however pointed to continuing problems throughout the afternoon.

At around 4pm UKFast said it was still suffering from "residual issues", but a number of customers took to Twitter to complain about the service, with some saying their website had been offline for six hours. Others tweeting at just before 5pm however said that their service had been restored.

Speaking to CRN this evening, from the datacentre, UKFast CEO Lawrence Jones said that a delay in the back-up generator kicking in led to a few moments of power outage, which caused a knock-on effect once the power was back on.

The power cut, he understands, came after workers in the area cut two power supplies into the facility.

He said that the problem is now effecting fewer than 100 customers, and that the issue should be resolved soon.

"I would say now, it's minutes for some clients and maybe hours for others, but we are at the end this now," he added.

"I can only apologise; I'm not going anywhere until every single customer is online."

Earlier today customers were angrily referring to a section on UKFast's datacentre, which claims: "Our Tier 3 standard datacentres have concurrent maintainability to ensure 100% uptime."

Customers also pointed out that the datacentre which has suffered the problems is listed as having multiple power supplies and so, in theory, should be protected from power outages.

Cas Paton, managing director of UKFast customer OnBuy, told CRN that the outage is "unfathomable and should be impossible".

OnBuy is a UK marketplace which pits itself against Amazon's retail business.

When CRN spoke to Paton at 5pm this evening the OnBuy website had been down since before 11am and was still displaying a message that said: "503 Service Unavailable. No server is available to handle this request."

OnBuy this week launched a nationwide marketing campaign, costing the company thousands, but currently has no website to receive potential customers.

"We have told [UKFast] in no uncertain terms that we are absolutely disgusted with the way the situation has been handled," Paton said.

"We've lost tens of thousands of pounds and we have people sitting around because they can't work."

Paton said that OnBuy has already started looking at plans to leave UKFast

He expressed his anger at the lack of communication from UKFast, claiming that if he had a better understanding of how long the outage was going to last he could have planned accordingly.

He also said that one of OnBuy's servers came back online within minutes of the outage, which led him to believe that UKFast may be switching smaller businesses back on first and leaving larger organisations until last.

Paton however stopped short of saying that the outage is another nail in the coffin of local hosting providers that are trying to keep up with the likes of Microsoft and Amazon Web Services.

"I don't think this is a reflection on providers in the UK - I think it's a failure of one particular company," he said.

Updated

CRN had previously reported claims that UKFast does not allow customers to host their cloud environments across multiple datacentres.

UKFast CEO Lawrence Jones however contacted us saying that this is not the case, adding that customers have the option to put infastructure in multiple datacentres, for additional cost.

He also confirmed that all issues have now been resolved.