Brit colo outfit Alphadex offline all weekend after attack

Little explanation offered leaving users mad as hell as hundreds of sites go dark

British data centre provider Alphadex has been hit by a weekend-long outage. Users report that everything they host with the company has gone down, along with Alphadex's own control panels and management interfaces.

Details of the incident are sketchy, with Alphadex offering only Tweets to explain the situation.

Customers first noticed problems on Friday evening, UK time, leading Alphadex to respond with this Tweet.

Sorry for the delay in responding I have been informed that router issues in our London DC and technical are on site I can only apologise

— Alphadex (@AlphadexLtd) February 28, 2014

By Saturday Alphadex was telling customers that a security incident, not a faulty router, was the problem.

We are currently experiencing a DOS attack against our services – Network engineers are working on the issue to bring the services back ASAP

— Alphadex (@AlphadexLtd) March 1, 2014

Come Sunday, the company was sticking to the story about security problems .

Attacked over the weekend and our technical team are working round the clock to resolve the issues and I can only apologise.

— Alphadex (@AlphadexLtd) March 2, 2014

Users are livid. On the Alphadex Facebook page customers are offering comments such as “I can't get an answer from your 24/7 phone line. You haven't published any update on your website, Twitter nor FB. What am I supposed to tell my clients? This is damaging my business!”

Other users report the same experience: all services down, no phone support, no notifications on social media.

Here's a typical reaction from a customer:

“As a customer of yours, I and many others need to know an ETA on recover of your systems. I have 100's of sites that cant be seen and an email system which will not route email due to your routing issues of DNS. No reply from your support is not good and will have a lasting repercussion with your clients. Your FB and Twitter and alive and you should be reaching out to us from here. This is Business Critical!”

Alphadex operates co-location centres in London, Manchester and Bradford and says the “three data centres provide highly secure, geographically dispersed computing environments with 24 hour A/C power, UPS with emergency generator backup, computer monitored climate control for heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC), fire detection & suppression and multi-layer security.”

At least one link in that chain has broken and Alphadex is having trouble getting everything back together.

Quite how that experience matches Alphadex's insistence, here on its support page, that "We're passionate about customer service and support. Our dedication is second to none" is hard to know.

Let's leave the last word to a comment on the Alphadex Facebook page:

“I don't think there is anyone there. I predict the service will resume at 7.30am when they arrive at work. Even the mailbox on their mobile answerphone is full so they are obviously not picking up messages. Most hosting companies are 365 24/7. This is awful customer service and just makes us look bad as website designers if we can't keep our sites online. This is so damaging for business.”

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