Customers of business broadband and hosting provider Fastnet are currently experiencing a “major, wide scale service outage” across their VMWare hosting platform, which is affecting web, email, DNS hosting including cPanel services, Virtual Datacentre and some other services. But connectivity, DSL and Ethernet services are said to be “unaffected“.
At the time of writing, Fastnet’s service status page still appears to be offline and the ISP has instead replaced the front page of their website with a full-screen notice about the problem, which is rarely a good sign. The situation appears to have started last night at around 7-8pm and the vendor of their VMWare platform has been called in to assist with resolving it.
According to the most recent update, which was posted at 10:32am today: “Specialist engineers have arrived at our affected site and are progressing with their diagnosis, working as fast as possible to facilitate system recovery of our most essential services. We still cannot provide an ETA at this time.”
However, despite the ISP stating that their connectivity services are “unaffected“, the provider has also said: “Broadband customers that currently have working internet connections are advised NOT to reboot their routers in order to troubleshoot issues with our other services as this may cause subsequent reconnections to fail and take your connection offline.”
UPDATE 5:21pm
The most recent update, which was posted at 4:45pm, states: “Engineers are continuing work to activate the DR plan. We apologise for the impact to your services, and will keep this page updated with progress.”
At present there is still no indication of how long this will take to resolve, which must be quite worrying for their customers.
UPDATE 15th Aug 2024 @ 7:46am
The latest update, which was posted at 7:27am this morning, suggests that they’ve had to build some sort of new ‘recovery infrastructure’ to resolve the issue (the details are extremely vague): “The recovery infrastructure is now available, and engineers are working on data migration to the new environment.” But still no ETA for a resolution.