OVHcloud said on Wednesday that it was experiencing a network outage following a “human error” during the reconfiguration of one of its data centres. “Following a human error during the reconfiguration of the network on our DC to VH (US-EST), we have a problem on the whole backbone,” OVH Founder and Chairman Octave Klaba said.
He further added on Twitter that the network reconfiguration was aimed at adding capacity to stem a hike in so-called Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) cyberattacks.
The company Tweeted: “Network and racks:: VIN/DC: We will do a maintenance on our routers on VIN DC to improve our routing. Maintenance is planned for 13/Oct/21 9:00 AM to 10:30 AM ( UTC+2). No impact expected, device will be isolated before the change.”
The OVHcloud teams quickly intervened to isolate the equipment at 10.15 AM. Services have been restored since this intervention, the company said in a statement. We are currently conducting verification campaign with our customers to confirm that all their services have been restored. “We sincerely apologise to all our customers affected by this incident and we commit to be transparent as possible about the causes and consequences of the incident,” OVHcloud said.
OVH is Europe’s largest hosting provider and the third-largest globally with 32 data centres in OVHcloud’s global network.
However, customers were not impressed with this outage. Xenios Charalambous, founder at Xenios Fitness Tweeted: “OVH services are down. A few months ago you had a downtime of over 8 hours because of the poor measurements you take on the safety of the buildings. Now another downtime for god knows how long is going to take. As soon as this downtime is over I am moving out of OVH.”
The incident Charalambous is referring to has to do with a fire, which ravaged one of its facilities in Strasbourg, in March. Cyber attacks have seen an alarming increase this year with Facebook being the latest victim. More than a billion users of users of Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram were unable to access their services for around 7 hours, due to a network outage.
