Network Connectivity Outage, Montreal BHS Datacenter

Dear clients:

A major datacenter outage at our Montreal BHS datacenter affected over 40,000 clients between 12:15PM and 5PM. During this period, roughly 70% of the network capacity went down, congesting the remaining 30% of the network and causing sites and servers to become very slow and/or unresponsive. Our ticketing system and live chat system were also offline during this period.

The issue was quickly identified and emergency repair crews were dispatched to fix the problem with the network lines linking to the Newark POP, about 10km away from the datacenter. Due to the unusual nature of the outage, the incident required the intervention of several technical teams in order to resolve the problem. In parallel, a planned activation of a new set of network connections totalling over 600GB of redundant network throughput scheduled to go live in mid-November were accelerated in order to compensate for the downed network segment. This new network capacity is expected to be fully operational within the next 24 hours and will effectively double the current network capacity as well as act as a redundant route to prevent any downtime in the event of similar incidents in the future.

Web Hosting Canada deeply apologizes for the inconvenience caused as a result of this outage. We make your site’s performance and availability our #1 priority and stand by our SLA commitment of 99.9% availability, with uptime credits being issued for all clients affected. If your account was affected by the outage, please reach out to [email protected] and our team will credit your account for the incurred downtime. Furthermore, with the new network routes going live this month, this type of incident should be a story of the past, even in extreme cases of actual damage to the network lines outside of the datacenter.

We thank you for your understanding and cooperation, and invite you to get in touch with us should you have any additional questions or concerns.