Communications supplier
Colt is running
checks on its 18 european datacentres to ensure there is no repeat
of a a failure that led to
Lastminute.com's website
going offline for 11 hours.
A power outage at a Colt datacentre brought down the main
Lastminute website and subsidiary sites including
Medhotels.com,
Holidayautos.co.uk and
Travelocity.co.uk.
Lastminute's website
was offline from 3pm on Friday 4 July until 2am the following
morning, during a week that is traditionally one of the busiest of
the year.
Colt said the fault was with the main circuit breakers for the
data hall which hosted Lastminute.com's equipment.
"We have done a full root cause analysis and have put in place
preventative measures to ensure it doesn't happen again at that
specific data centre. We are also undertaking checks at all our
data centres to avoid a similar incident at any of our facilities,"
said Colt.
"To put the power outage in context, it is very unusual in our
experience - we have 18 data centres across Europe, thousands of
customers and have been running highly resilient data centres for
nine years."
Website downtime is expensive for companies such as
Lastminute.com, which builds its entire business around a web
presence, said Martin Couzins, managing editor of Travel
Weekly,
He said the fact that the website was unavailable for so long at
a traditionally busy time would have cost the company in both
financial terms and in harm to its reputation.
"The whole business is based on looking for a holiday at the
last minute and Friday is a peak time for people looking for to get
away for the weekend, and is also a peak time of the year for
people booking holidays," Couzins added. "It goes without saying
that it is shocking that the site was down for 11 hours and I am
sure it will not happen again."
Lastminute.com and Colt would not comment on whether back-up was
in place.