'Ninety-nine per cent of customers have thanked us for outage response' - UKFast CEO Jones

Jones praises staff after resolving yesterday's datacentre outage and promises new failover to prevent a recurrence of the problem

"Ninety-nine per cent" of UKFast's customers have thanked the firm for its handling of yesterday's datacentre outage, according to CEO Lawrence Jones, who also promised a new failover system to prevent a recurrence of the problem.

One of UKFast's datacentres experienced problems yesterday after losing power, with some customers complaining of being offline for over 11 hours.

Speaking to CRN this morning, Jones (pictured) praised both his staff and the vast majority of customers for the way they handled the incident.

"Ninety-nine per cent of our customers have messaged in and spoke to us last night saying thanks so much for our response to the outage," he said.

"I've just fed my team because I've just come back in this morning and about 35 to 40 of them did a 25-hour shift because there are still bits and pieces that needed doing."

Jones said that customers can expect a full report of the failure in the coming days, but elaborating more on the technical issues, added that the bulk of the issues stemmed from a problem with VMware.

"Ninety-nine per cent of the stuff was up within minutes but there will always be problems when there's an outage because things get damaged," he explained.

"The most infuriating thing was that it was a VMware auto deployer that slowed us down. We just couldn't get past this system until we fixed it. VMware helped us and did quite a good job to begin with, but it then corrupted again and then our team fixed it."

UKFast faced a backlash on social media yesterday from disgruntled customers suffering outages, but said that customers with adequate disaster recovery plans in place were unaffected.

Jones said that the hosting provider will now be investing in protocols to help make sure that the customers affected by the issue will not fall victim again.

"In 18 years we've never had an issue like the one we had yesterday," he added. "As a customer you might go five years without a problem, but it's how you deal with it when you have a problem.

"As part-apology we're going to [put in] a failover to our other datacentre, and we're going to put significant investment into the cost of that."