Like many interested in technology, we read TechCrunch on a daily (sometimes weekly) basis like clockwork… until you get an error 403 Forbidden.

Through Michael Arrington on Twitter (@arrington) and Robert Schoble (@scobleizer) the information has become available that points the naughty finger at Rackspace Cloud.  This was not exactly a TechCrunch problem. More can be read about the outage on the Rackspace Official Blog. 

Techcrunch was reporting they were still serving pages due to their “super-aggressive-mega-cache” but if you look at my screen capture you’ll see that didn’t work for me.  True, I may of hit the site at the exact moment the entire Rackspace Dalls NOC was being rebooted (was there a brown-out in Dallas last night about the same time? Hmmm..)

This took out big guys like SliceHost (A web hosting company I have been watching for some time), Tr.im, Posterous, and many others.  Even though downtime was just over an hour, it was during the middle of the night when traffic/visitors to the site is at the lowest.  For a site that receives over 3m uniques a month (according to Quantcast  - the actual number may be significantly higher) taking the site down and potential ad revenue’s away for even the one hour does have a cost associated to it.

From what I’ve been able to gather with various reports, this is a major outage from Rackspace that has ever been caused by power (or UPS, whatever).  

I don’t buy their (rackspace) explanation for why they screwed up.  I’m not a current customer of Rackspace, but this will certainly affect my decision to do business with them now.  I’m a believer in truth, even if it means you screwed up and someone get’s fired.  Don’t try to hoodwink a geek who understands technology.  Unless you’re using cheap & unreliable power gear, there would be no reason a simple metering test (per their own explaination) would cause such a large-scale outage.

That’s just how I feel. It’s a load of crap and one of the biggest sites took the hit for them.  Boo!  Smells like a Rackspace problem, Looks like a Rackspace problem – Call the spade a spade guys!

What’s your opinion on the failure?

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