MWeb Business client services are “now fully restored and operational”, parent Internet Solutions said on Tuesday after a “systems provisioning error” led to a major problem in the company’s virtual hosting environment at the weekend.
Clients reportedly lost data as a result of the error.
The problems began on Friday, with MWeb Business — which was recently acquired by Internet Solutions — working through the weekend to restore services.
“MWeb Business experienced a systems provisioning error, which affected the availability of a number of its products and services,” Internet Solutions explained in a statement.
“This error occurred early on Friday morning. By 10am on Friday, the majority of its products and services had been restored. However, the virtual hosting environment remained affected.”
Virtual hosting is typically used by smaller businesses that don’t run large websites that require dedicated servers. This environment was only fully restored on Sunday afternoon.
ITWeb reported on Tuesday that customers who had interacted with technical staff at MWeb Business had received feedback that a “provisioning tool” had been updated, but this tool apparently contained an error in a script that caused it to erase all running virtual machines.
Internet Solutions confirmed that the issue experienced was “the result of a system provisioning error” and said it was “not in any way related to the data centre”, which reports published elsewhere had “incorrectly indicated”.
“The priority of MWeb Business has been to restore services as quickly as possible and this required the assigning of new Internet protocol addresses for all sites. MWeb Business virtual machine clients are now able to reinstall their instances with their backed-up data.”
Those without backups have, however, lost data. Internet Solutions reiterated that the backup of website data is the responsibility of MWeb Business clients.
Clients that use the virtual machine product will receive a credit for the month of July, it said.
Meanwhile, MWeb has moved to distance itself from the problem. It said MWeb Business was sold to Internet Solutions in January and the incident “has nothing to do with MWeb”.
“MWeb is in the process of looking at decommissioning the MWeb Business brand, but you will appreciate that this is not a short-term fix and will require some planning and implementation,” the company said. — © 2015 NewsCentral Media
