Rackspace experiences a rather embarrassing cloud shortage
Cloud giant Rackspace reportedly ran out of some cloud storage space last month, affecting customers in its London region, and many are still paying the price with the company confirming continuing service degradation.
As revealed by The Register, Rackspace confirmed that problems started on November 17, when “a portion of Cloud Files customers may experience 503 errors when attempting to access their files in the LON region.”
The company says that its engineers “continue work to fully remediate the issue in the best possible time,” but for some, problems have continued into December.
Rackspace ran out of space
In a system status statement, the company added that its engineers started to increase the storage capacity in the London region on November 24, but that the mitigation would take effect over a number of days.
On November 28, Rackspace said: “Customers should be able to access already uploaded content but may experience issues processing new uploads or delete actions.”
As outages continued, we were told on November 30 that drives, which have to be replaced as a group, were being replaced with even larger-capacity counterparts, but it gets worse, because some were not being recognized by the configuration and had to be re-introduced or replaced… again.
Today marks the two-week anniversary of Rackspace’s pretty serious blunder, and it remains to be seen how long it will take for all of the drives to be back up and running.
While skeptics have expressed concern that an Internet outage could render any data in the cloud unusable, or at least inaccessible for a period of time, this mishap introduces a different type of threat that we would expect to be an easy one to mitigate.
TechRadar Pro has asked Rackspace how it allowed this to happen, but the company did not immediately respond.
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