Lycos and Hotbot Down Update

Now that Lycos and its websites are up, newsites are beginning to report on the outage.

Basically put, their internet provider Savvis had an extrodinary outage where two of their Data Centers went offline.

Now note that these Data Centers have backup lines to cater for various types of outages. So, what went wrong? Well, the backup data line connecting the Data centers was accidentally severed while repairs were being conducted on the main line which was also down at the time. Talk about Murphy's Law in full action.

I have seen no figures yet as to how many sites were affected but wow!! Every site in the Lycos network in the US was offline for way to long. Lycos stands to lose users as a result of this - already something hard to keep hold of in the world of Google, MSN and YAHOO.

So, who gets to pay any lawsuits should they pop up? Actually, will any lawsuits come of this? Note that many other websites went offline, not just the Lycos Network. Either way, good to see Lycos and Hotbot back home on the Web.





Blog entry when it went down http://iceorb.blogspot.com/2007/01/lycos-and-hotbot-down.html

Lycos and Hotbot Down

For a while it looked as if HotBot was gone - to become just another part of Internet History. Forget getting to Hotbot, I could not even resolve its DNS address. Upon further investigation, it looked like Hotbot UK was ok.

So...

Think process goes that if Hotbot is gone, then Lycos would have some sort of new message about it (they own HotBot). Guess what, Lycos had the same issue!!!
Every Lycos site in the US including their news, mail and main site were down. I noticed the Canadian site for Lycos down as well.

Now something has gone terribly wrong here. The way the internet is designed, there should have been redundancies built in so that both Lycos and Hotbot could be resolved if the primary DNS was out.

Should be interesting to see what the press release about this comes out as. One would suspect a major stuff-up on the side of their ISP or Registrar.

We wait....