Quick, Plug The Internet Back In: Major Rackspace Outage

Apparently a traffic accident is to blame for a major datacenter outage this evening. Rackspace’s Dallas datacenter lost electricity shortly after a traffic accident caused damage to a power transformer. Rackspace’s generators kicked in but, as we’ve seen before, lots of other things can then go wrong. In this case, two chillers within the data center failed to start back up, and a number of servers were taken offline to avoid damage from overheating.

Laughing Squid’s Scott Beale, who is affected by the outage, has been posting status updates on his blog. Since Rackspace doesn’t have any blog or status page for outages, Scott is our only direct source of information right now.

We’re tracking who’s offline. 37Signals is down. Who else?

Update: They’re back up. Total outage time was around 3 hours. Rackspace’s official response is here.