It all went down on last weekend when the web hosting company, 123-reg made a horrific error which brought a lot of websites offline and completely deleted their data.
On Saturday morning, the hosting company ran a script as a part of their clean-up process on the 123-reg VPS platform. But this script had a major error and it ended up deleting a bunch of virtual private networks.
According to the reports, a total of 67 servers have been affected and many customers have said that their entire businesses have wiped off.
This was definitely disappointing coming from a company which handles over 3.5 million domain names and 1.7 million websites.
123-reg issued a statement, but not an action
On its official Twitter page, the company issued the following statement:
“Service is being restored for the majority of customers affected. If you are still affected, please pm or email vps-team-123@123-reg.co.uk.”
But the customers are still facing issues. While one customer reported that their website’s virtual private server is still down, another reported that the data on his website looks corrupt.
In order to subdue the situation, the company’s brand manager Richard Winslow sent an email update to all the 123-reg customers. He said, “123-reg is doing everything in its power to restore as much of your data as possible. Whilst the 123-reg VPS product is an unmanaged service, we have committed a large number of resources to help restore services back to normal as quickly as possible. We are working with experts across Europe, including the world’s leading data restoration company, Kroll Ontrack.”
“I fully understand how important your VPS service is to you and I would like to apologise for the downtime you have faced. As soon as we have more information on the status of your restoration, I will be in touch”, he added.
123-reg had no backups to rely on
While every IT company knows that disasters cannot be avoided, sometimes they just happen and you really cannot blame a single person for it. But, to get over disasters like this, companies make sure that they have up to date backups, both offline and off-site. So that, even if some data is deleted, it can be restored quickly with the help of backups.
But it was very surprising to see that 123-reg did not even have a backup to rely on. These kind of practices are highly frowned upon in the hosting world and if this is really the case we wouldn’t be surprised to see a lot of customers jumping the ship.
Most of the websites supported by 123-reg are still down and will have to wait and see how much time it takes for the company to bring the websites back online.
