Brief Network Outage Impacts SoftLayer Customers

A Seattle-area data center operated by SoftLayer  lost Internet connectivity this afternoon, leaving customer sites offline for about 45 minutes. The data center never lost power and servers continued to run, but had no connectivity.

"We have experienced a dual-path fiber outage SEA01 datacenter," SoftLayer reported on its Twitter feed. "All SEA01 servers lost Internet connectivity." The outage has disrupted both the public and private networks at the facility.

The outage knocked out services for a number of web hosts that use the Seattle data center, including Name.com, Hosting Nation, Crucial Web Hosting and Hawk Host. Web sites came back online quickly once SoftLayer's network provider restored service to the facility. Outages caused by connectivity problems typically have a shorter impact than those caused by power outages, as a sudden loss of electricity can cause hardware problems with power supplies and other components.