blog Last month was a good one for local enterprise telco and hosting company Macquarie Telecom. The company hosted Julia Gillard for a ritzy launch of its new datacentre, drank champagne and toasted its success. But the past two days haven’t been quite as rosy for the firm. Rumours of a major outage over the past several days are floating around on industry mailing lists such as AusNOG. One poster wrote, for example:

“Most folks prob know this already but … Looks like MT had a massive SAN failure yesterday around 8.30am and lots of customers still out. Seems one of the clusters was showing connection issues so they rebooted one of the two controller cards — whole env went boom and the lost access to the lot for over 4 hours. Still in process of recovering and restoring from backup.”

And now the organisation appears to have confirmed the problem to The Australian newspaper. To be brutally honest, this isn’t a good look for Macquarie, and does much to illustrate the immaturity of the hosting market in Australia. An outage lasting a few hours is enough of a catastrophe for Macquarie, but 48 hours? Macquarie’s customers are usually large organisations with high-end requirements. That length of outage would be enough to send many looking for another option. Oh dear. Say goodbye to your five nines rating … actually Macquarie might be struggling to make two nines at this point.

Update: After the publication of this story, we received the following statement from Macquarie Telecom managing director of Hosting, Aidan Tudehope:

“Over the last 48 hours 65 customers have experienced network outages that left them unable to access cloud storage. Our technicians have been working around the clock to identify and fix the issue, and the majority of customers were back online within 12 hours. We expect to restore full services to the remaining eight customers by today.

We are still working on a detailed analysis of the cause of the outage, but can confirm that it relates to a storage area network at our Intellicentre 1. We deeply regret the disruption caused to our customers. All affected customers will receive a rebate on their bill for the period of the outage. Our service managers, CEO and myself have proactively communicated throughout with all affected customers, and we will continue to update them on the progress of remediation works.”

Image credit: Macquarie Telecom

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1. Hugh Jaas
   Posted 11/10/2012 at 2:06 pm | Permalink | Reply

   Another great example of clown computing.

   • Shannon Pace
     Posted 11/10/2012 at 7:42 pm | Permalink | Reply

     the only ‘clown’ is the one who thinks that cloud computing is 100% reliable…. shit happens.

2. Mike
   Posted 12/10/2012 at 8:08 am | Permalink | Reply

   When you can’t even migrate an internet gateway client after 4 years and numerous attempts, how are can you effectively provide a cloud service.

3. Igor Yearn
   Posted 12/10/2012 at 8:24 am | Permalink | Reply

   At least they didn’t run out of water in the datacentre this time.

   They should probably focus less on PR with the PM and more on the P in relation to Product.

4. Brad
   Posted 17/05/2013 at 12:06 pm | Permalink | Reply

   Has anyone had any dealings with Macquarie Telecom of late. I’d like to hear anyone’s thoughts or experiences with MT, specifically with the Secure Internet Gateway project for Government agencies?

   Brad

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