iiNet has attributed an email and web hosting server outage that started on Christmas Day to a cooling system “malfunction” in its Perth data centre on a day of extreme heat.
As reported by iTnews, the iiNet’s own website, customer email servers and virtual private server (VPS) hosting were all impacted by the “data centre issue”, caused by the weather.
Western Australia experienced its hottest Christmas Day, according to reports. “In the afternoon of December 25, the extreme heat in Western Australia resulted in several servers shutting down and loss of connectivity after the cooling system malfunctioned at the iiNet data centre.” the spokesperson said.
“The iiNet website, iiNet domain email services and the iiNet customer call centre were affected. Customer services were restored early on the morning of December 27. However, iiNet email customers may have experienced some email delays over the following days as the email backlog was cleared.”
iiNet customers reported as recently as the weekend that email services, in particular, had been slow to recover from the incident. However, its internet and mobile services were not impacted by the issue.
iiNet previously had issues with its Perth data centre in 2015 due to heatwave conditions, and in 2018 due to site power loss.