Affinity.com, Valueweb.com and Gate.com disappear!

Anyone know what's up?

[lexipixel]

Anyone know what's up ?

I have about 60 of my customer's shared hosting accounts on Affinity's Valueweb.com and Gate.com servers.

All email, web and even their usually excellent 24/7 toll free phone lines has been vaporized into the ether, (including the Valueweb.com, Gate.com and Affinity.com corporate sites).

Affinity got bought by Hostway last month... Maybe this is all planned and they just forgot to tell their customers they were packing up and moving?

Or maybe a major DNS blowout.

It's been about 15 hours now.

[MacFrank]

Not sure what is up, but I just did a WHOIS at NetSol, and saw that my domains DNS servers had been changed from the external DNS services that I had setup. Strange.

[lexipixel]

We're at about 18 hours now. They finally put the phone system back on -- with a canned "outage" message on the support line.

The message says: "if you are calling because your website, email, etc.. are not functioning... we are experiencing a network outage". Then asks you to please hang if you are calling to report problems because the wait time will be extensive. Then says their network engineers are working on it and things are coming back online and they expect websites and email to start coming back online in and hour and a half to two hours".

[lexipixel]

UPDATE: 36 Hours Down for many customers. <snip>
<delete blog link>

[edited by: lawman at 3:45 pm (utc) on May 28, 2008]
[edit reason] TOS 12; Delete Blog Ling [/edit]

[wheel]

Perhaps by 'migration' they mean unplug the servers, ship cross country via UPS, insert into new datacenter.

[gangadevi]

I spoke with one of their web designers this morning just to speak with a live person, and he told me there was a major accident, unpreventable, etc. I read another post from a customer who was told there was a fire. As of this morning their support line message says they are back online. They are, but lots of their customers are not.

[lexipixel]

They don't say it was a fire --- here's a snip from an announcement from their "Gate" division:

"...On Tuesday, May 27th, our Fort Lauderdale facility experienced a complete loss of power that resulted in a prolonged service interruption for many of our customers..."

They then go on to describe the source of the problem in detail:

"...beginning with the rupture of a coolant system at approximately 7pm, EDT. The rupture and subsequent coolant leak occurred in the power room and damaged both the primary UPS unit and its backup. This event also triggered our fire safety system and cut all power to the affected zone, which in turn prevented the generator from automatically starting..."

As RIPLEY says: "believe it or not"..