C4L Resolves Service Outage, Blames Software Glitch

Cloud and colocation provider C4L has successfully restored services after a traumatic couple of days.

It seemed the problem was down to a software fault with the routing and switching equipment it uses from Juniper Networks. But Juniper was not apparently to blame, as the company pointed to an “extended problem” with its legacy network.

Service Outage

The Bournemouth-based service provider first began to experience problems on Monday 24 August. A number of services, including its telephone and online support service reportedly failed, and the company resorted to Twitter to update its customers on the problem.

The company quickly identified the root cause of the problem as being software related and said it was “not due to external factors.”

The company told TechweekEurope that its coreTX network was down for less than a day, however there were a small percentage of certain customer services on its legacy network which were affected over a two day period.

And then late on Wednesday afternoon C4L confirmed that the problem has been fully resolved.

“C4L are pleased to announce that the subject maintenance notification has been completed successfully,” it said. “Works were completed on schedule with monitoring and testing platforms returning positive results throughout.”

“C4L have  sincerely apologised to all customers for the inconvenience caused by the disruption, regardless of whether this interruption was relatively short lived or took longer to return to full service,” the company said in a statement.

“We value each and every one of our customers and this is why we are pleased to announce our teams have this morning started on a project to migrate all legacy network customers over to our coreTX network which coped much better with this disturbance,” it added.

C4L provides colocation, connectivity and cloud solutions to “government agencies, FTSE 250 companies, international financial institutions, system integrators, top 100 VARs, resellers and many of the UK’s network carriers.”

It has its own data centre on the South coast (which did not suffer an outage), but also has  access to over 100 UK data centres and more than 300 globally. It also owns a fully privately owned, high-capacity, 1-100Gb fibre-optic network.

In 2012, it teamed up with Natural Enterprise to provide high-speed Internet to rural areas on the Isle of Wight.

DC Outages

With the cloud and many online services nowadays, data centre outages can often have a big impact on businesses, customers, and other organisations.

Last month the Italian data centre belonging to Colt suffered a power outage which was blamed on utility power supply outages. Firefighters attended that data centre in Milan after smoke rose from the building.

In April, up to 1.5 million Three customers were without service on following an electrical failure at a data centre in Ireland.

And even the mighty Google has been affected. Last week Google admitted that lighting strikes at its data centre in Belgium were the cause of the four-day cloud outage.

Think you know about the Cloud? Take our quiz!