Afrihost hit with massive outage at data centre
A cooling system failure at MTN’s Gallo Manor data centre has caused an extended outage affecting Afrihost’s hosting services.
Customers are complaining that their email services and websites hosted through Afrihost have been offline for upwards of thirty hours.
Afrihost first notified customers about the outage at 18:46 on Wednesday, 29 June 2022.
“We are currently experiencing a disruption in the data centre affecting our hosting environment, affected servers will experience limited to no access to the outside,” its notice stated.
“Our technicians are looking at the problem and hope to have it resolved shortly. We apologise for any inconvenience that this may be causing.”
Afrihost’s last update on the outage was posted at 09:07 on Thursday morning.
“Our engineers are still working on restoring connectivity to all the affected servers. We sincerely apologise for any inconvenience caused,” it said.
Frustrated users have taken to social media and emailed MyBroadband to voice their complaints.
“Afrihost servers have been down for more than 24 hours… Can’t send you this email via my regular address for that reason. It’s causing huge problems for people,” one Afrihost customer told MyBroadband.
“Please investigate this. Has it been a hack? It’s been 30 hours now! What’s going on @Afrihost?” another asked on Twitter.
“Are our emails going to be lost or recovered all we need to know?” another wanted to know.
No estimated time to restore service was known at the time of publication.
MyBroadband contacted MTN for comment, and it confirmed the outage at its data centre.
“MTN can confirm that one of its coolers at the Gallo Manor data centre was impacted following a power outage on Wednesday afternoon,” an MTN South Africa spokesperson said.
“However, the cooling system is redundant and therefore did not fully shut down and was in fact fully restored within 45 minutes. MTN is liaising with customers to investigate any impact on their operations.”
Update (Friday, 1 July 2022 at 12:00) — Afrihost said that by noon on Friday, its team had recovered 9.3% of affected servers. It encouraged clients to visit the Afrihost Network Status page for updates about the outage.
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