Namecheap has said a major service outage that disrupted its website and several customer services on August 13 was caused by a cooling system failure at the RadiusDC: Phoenix data centre in the United States.
The domain registrar and web hosting company said the cooling failure occurred after a major storm, causing temperatures around its infrastructure at the facility to reach critical levels. RadiusDC subsequently instructed Namecheap to take some services offline to protect customer infrastructure from overheating and potentially suffering longer-term or catastrophic damage.
The company said all services affected by the incident have now been restored, while its teams continue to monitor the systems to ensure they remain stable.
The disruption also affected TechMedia Africa, whose website is hosted on Namecheap. The publication’s homepage went offline for several hours during the incident, while its team was also unable to access the website’s backend.
Why the data centre developed cooling problems
According to Namecheap, the incident began when cooling systems failed at the RadiusDC: Phoenix data centre following a major storm in the area.
Checks by TechMedia Africa show that the Phoenix metropolitan area experienced significant monsoon storms on Wednesday, August 12, with reports of heavy rain, strong winds and other severe weather conditions across parts of the region.
Reuters also reported that a powerful microburst hit Chandler, Arizona, on Wednesday as intense monsoon thunderstorms swept across the Phoenix metropolitan area. The severe weather was strong enough to cause damage and temporarily disrupt operations at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport.
Namecheap, however, did not provide further technical details on exactly how the storm caused the cooling system to fail. It said the resulting failure pushed temperatures around its infrastructure to critical levels, forcing the company to shut down affected services.
The company described the incident as highly unusual, given the design of the facility.
“RadiusDC: Phoenix is a Tier 3 datacenter, designed with a high level of redundancy. That made this an extremely unusual incident, and one we had not experienced before in our 25-year history,” the statement said.
Namecheap said keeping its systems running while temperatures remained unsafe could have caused equipment to overheat and suffer serious damage. It therefore kept affected infrastructure offline until the cooling systems were restored and temperatures returned to safe levels.
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Namecheap outage disrupted hosting, email and DNS management
The outage affected several layers of Namecheap’s infrastructure, meaning customers experienced different problems depending on the services they used.
For hosting customers, websites and hosting services became unavailable, slow or returned errors. Some billing operations were also disrupted after the system responsible for processing them was taken offline.
EasyWP customers experienced disruptions to both the dashboard and their websites. Namecheap said some websites remained unavailable even after EasyWP.com and the dashboard had been restored, with some returning database connection errors. The company said those issues have since been resolved.
Private Email was also affected. Customers using the service were unable to send emails, while incoming messages could not be delivered while the relevant servers were offline.
Namecheap stressed that incoming emails were not automatically lost as a result of the outage. It said mail providers normally retry delivery when a receiving server is temporarily unavailable, meaning affected messages would arrive later once the receiving servers were back online.
DNS zone resolution remained available during the incident, although customers could not access DNS management. URL redirects using BasicDNS and PremiumDNS continued to resolve, but their management was unavailable.
The outage also affected Namecheap’s support operations, leaving its helpdesk unable to assist customers through live chat or email.
For TechMedia Africa, the disruption meant that the publication’s homepage was inaccessible for several hours, while access to the backend was also unavailable. The homepage was restored the following day as Namecheap progressively brought its affected infrastructure back online.
Namecheap restored services in stages
Namecheap said RadiusDC began restoring cooling capacity as soon as possible, with temporary chillers installed and directed into the affected area of the data centre to help bring temperatures down.
Its teams then worked continuously on site alongside RadiusDC to restore the cooling systems.
Namecheap said it only began bringing services back online after temperatures had returned to safe operating levels and it was confident that there was no longer a risk of overheating or long-term equipment damage.
The recovery was carried out progressively rather than by switching all services back on simultaneously. This meant customers saw different services return at different times.
According to Namecheap, this was necessary because its hosting and email services depend on multiple layers of infrastructure, including servers, networks, storage and databases. These components had to be brought back online in the correct order to ensure the recovery did not create additional problems.
The company said all affected systems are now operational and that it is conducting a review of the incident.