UberGlobal suspects customer kit caused IT outage

Web host UberGlobal has released a preliminary post-incident report on a six-hour outage Friday, believed to be caused by customer equipment triggering an error-disable mode in the company's switches.

UberGlobal – which owns hosting brands AussieHQ and Jumba – noted the first outage started at 12.10pm and lasted approximately two hours and 20 minutes.

A second two-hour outage occurred at 4pm and then another at 6.30pm.

They caused "significant disruption to most services hosted in both Canberra and Sydney", according to a blog post by the firm.

While noting investigations were continuing, UberGlobal suspected that customer equipment shifted a couple of days earlier may be the root cause.

"It needs to be stressed that this is a preliminary finding, and the devices need to be separately tested to attempt to replicate the problem," the company said.

The host was also examining its use of the error disable feature of its Cisco switches, although it noted that this was the first issue it had had in about six years of their use.

UberGlobal won praise in the Whirlpool forums from users for their management of the issue and for releasing detailed post-incident information to customers in a short timeframe.

Update 28/6: Full post-incident report released.