NaviSite outage: 165.000 websites offline during 7 days

165.000 website sudently went offline and were offline during one full week, according to ComputerWorld.com. Why all this websites have been offline? A NaviSite Inc. datacenter migration failed and they had to physically move 200 of the 850 servers. Navisite is a provider of enterprise-class, cloud-enabled hosting, managed applications and services. NaviSite provides a full suite of managed services, including Application Services, industry-leading Enterprise Hosting, and Managed Cloud Services for enterprises.

NaviSite spokesman Rathin Sinha explained the issue:

As NaviSite tried to solve that problem, the network became overloaded because of all the customers trying to get online. What happened was first the URL could not match with the IP address and then IP did not match with the machine, so it took some time, and all this time we have a highly trafficked overloaded network. If there is one little problem, they multiply because there is a lot of dependencies.”

Customers were really furious about it. On of them, Cynthia Brumfield, president of Emerging Media Dynamics Inc. wrote on a blog post:

According to people who have talked to NaviSite’s tech personnel, they were ill equipped for the relocation and ignorant of how to accomplish even basic tasks. At this point, NaviSite’s poorly planned data center consolidation has slipped from mere incompetence to outrageous indifference to its customers’ needs and should be grounds for legal action, if not government sanctions of some kind.