NetDepot Data Center Outage Causes Prolonged Downtime for Customers

A data center outage in Atlanta that started on Sunday evening brought down servers used by many customers in a prolonged period of downtime, which according to some of them, lasted for more than 20 hours.

Customers of NetDepot, a data center service provider in the Atlanta facility, took to Twitter to vent their frustrations with the protracted outage and with what appeared to have been lackluster communication by the provider during the incident.

Joshua Distler, founder of LiveSurface, an online library of image templates for designers, told us via Twitter that servers that hosted the LiveSurface website in the data center went down around 9:30 p.m. Eastern on Sunday. They remained down as of Monday evening, he said.

According to Distler, the outage came during a scheduled maintenance period.

NetDepot representatives did not respond to a request for comment about the data center outage in time for publication.

The company said on its official Twitter feed Monday that there was a “network outage in one of our Atlanta zones.” The problem appears to have been caused by faulty VLANs (Virtual Local Area Networks), according to another Tweet by NetDepot:

NetDepot is a tenant in the 75,000-square-foot Atlanta data center, which since July 2014 belongs to Zayo subsidiary zColo. Besides Atlanta, NetDepot has data centers in Dallas and Los Angeles. Many NetDepot customers complained on Twitter about a lack of information about the outage from the provider. Some complained about more than 15 hours of downtime; others said their servers were down for 20-plus hours. Here are some examples:

Correction: An earlier version of this article erroneously stated that NetDepot owned the Atlanta data center. The facility's owner is zColo, a subsidiary of Zayo, and NetDepot is a tenant. The article has been corrected accordingly. Data Center Knowledge regrets the error.