Our hosting provider has unexpectedly scheduled emergency reparation of a backup power supply tonight (12.03.2008), causing downtime for the Runbox service. The outage will occur from approximately 24:00 CET (6 PM EST) tonight, and will last from 30 minutes up to 2 hours, according to our ISP.
We’re working with our maintenance personnel to minimize the downtime and its effects as much as possible. No email will be lost, as incoming email should be queued on the sending servers while ours are unresponsive.
On behalf of our hosting provider we apologize for the short notice — they have generally been very stable and hopefully this repair will prevent further downtime in the future.
Update 03:30 CET
We’re communicating with our hosting provider Ventelo and pushing them to finish up as quickly as possible, but it’s difficult to predict when our services will be up again; from half an hour to one hour is the latest estimate.Apparently there is a lot of equipment to physically move to replace a UPS (uninterrupted power supply consisting of huge battery packs etc — just what we could use right now) which is inextricably linked to the main power supply, and practically impossible to avoid an outage.
We’ve never experienced anything like this in the 9 years we’ve been with them, and it’s presumably a one-time occurrence.
Update 05:15 CET
Our hosting provider is cleaning up the remainder of the old UPS — apparently around one ton of equipment — and should be back online in 10-20 minutes.Once we have power again our servers should start up and resume all services by themselves, but there might be complications. We’ll do our best to get everything online as smoothly as possible.
Update 06:50 CET
Our servers now have power again after tonight’s outage, but there are problems with network connectivity. Our system administrators are working to resolve this and bring our services online again.
Update 08:00 CET
We finally have network connectivity and are bringing our servers back online in a controlled manner. Unless we encounter unexpected problems we should have services running normally shortly.
Update 08:20 CET
Service are now coming online again. POP and IMAP services are responding, and Webmail should also be online shortly. Incoming email has been queued on the sending servers and are now being received by our service.
Update 08:30 CET
Webmail is also running again now. Your messages might be inaccessible for a short while until we get the storage units straightened out.
Update 09:30 CET
If you’re not seeing the login box on http://www.runbox.com, your ISP is probably still pointing to a temporary page. Please use https://secure.runbox.com meanwhile.