WPX hosting outage caused anguish as WordPress websites were taken offline for hours
WPX Managed WordPress Hosting suffered an outage that may have taken down thousands of websites. The outage has lasted for hours. Many customers are complaining about a lack of communication from WPX.
Even the WPX website hosting site itself was unreachable.
A page hosted on their knowledge base subdomain (kb.wpx.net) was issuing this error message:
WPX responded issued a templated response to customers complaining on Twitter. The response begins with a comma, which was probably there so that the Twitter member’s name could be inserted into the blank space preceding the comma.
, apologized for the caused inconvenience! The Chicago datacenter is having technical issues at the moment. We have been assured that it will be resolved shortly, as the issue is beyond our control.
— WPX.net (@WPX_Hosting) August 2, 2021
, apologized for the caused inconvenience! The Chicago datacenter is having technical issues at the moment. We have been assured that it will be resolved shortly, as the issue is beyond our control.
— WPX.net (@WPX_Hosting) August 2, 2021
, apologized for the caused inconvenience! The Chicago datacenter is having technical issues at the moment. We have been assured that it will be resolved shortly, as the issue is beyond our control.
— WPX.net (@WPX_Hosting) August 2, 2021
The canned response contributed to a sense of unease and anger in a discussion in the Affiliate SEO Mastermind Facebook Group.
Various members commented on the perceived lack of communication, calling it “useless.” While another member of that Facebook group posted that the single update on Twitter was “pitiful.”
Another member said that they liked WPX but that they could have had more goodwill if they had been more forthcoming with information and called the lack of communication unacceptable.
The whois information for WPX.net shows that their domain is on the Steadfast ASN (Autonomous System Numbers).
ASN denotes the networks of IP addresses and they can be used to identify what the underlying data center infrastructure, which can sometimes give a clue as to what is going on.
Steadfast maintains data centers in Chicago, which coincides with the tweets by WPX that the problem is in a Chicago data center.
So it’s possible that Steadfast may be the underlying infrastructure to WPX hosting, although with the lack of information from WPX at this time, it’s difficult to say with 100% certainty.
The Steadfast help page reveals this support announcement:
“Customers are experiencing network intermittency due to access switch malfunction.
Our alerting system detected one of our switches running inconsistently, and after an initial investigation, the networking team evaluated a couple of possible situations that might trigger this event.
In the first hour, we restored services to 60% of the affected segment of clients. We are currently replacing the device that is causing this interruption, and we should be online within the hour.”
Sometimes Problems Happen
In this case the problem is out of the hands of WPX. It’s a problem with the underlying infrastructure which they are dependent on.
One customer on Twitter urged patience:
I was experiencing Cloud Cache issues last night, and I thought they fixed it, but a sad way to kick start the week. Anyway @WPX_Hosting team has been always kind to me and even though I don’t like it, I guess we need to be patient with them.
— siddhesh jain (@siddheshjain90) August 2, 2021
It appears that the issue is being addressed so patience is a not bad advice. Issues such as this are not normally predictable and even if the service is in the “cloud” there is still hardware involved that can fail.
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