Initial reports suggest alarms monitoring heating in the Johannesburg data centre housing 24.com’s entire Web presence was to blame for the downtime experienced by News24 and other high-profile websites at the weekend.

News 24 editor Jannie Momberg says the company is still investigating the cause of the downtime. However, he says: “It looks like it was an overheating issue in the data centre and our servers overheated.”

Momberg says it appears as if alarms that were set up to warn when servers were running too hot did not go off. Servers and data had to be restored once the problem had been resolved.

The 24.com sites were offline for about 17 hours, he says. Its backend systems are also hosted in the same data centre and were not accessible to editorial staff. News24 is SA’s largest news website.

MWeb has confirmed that it suffered “hardware failure” at its Johannesburg data centre over the weekend. CEO Rudi Jansen says the downtime was not in any way related to the hacking incident last week that brought down rival website, the Mail & Guardian Online.

Derek Hershaw, CEO of MWeb’s Internet service provider business, says the failure “affected a number of our services … in Victory Park. Our engineers were able to resolve the problem and all systems were restored to normal by Sunday evening.”

He says MWeb had a problem with one of the power feeds into its data centre, which had a direct impact on the air conditioning system. “As the temperature in the data centre increased some equipment went into stand-by to prevent damage.”

Hershaw says the company is monitoring the situation closely and that it doesn’t expect any further service disruptions. — Candice Jones, TechCentral