An outage lasting more than five hours on 2 January caused the web sites of web hosts and customers occupying the Boston data center of SAVVIS, to go offline.
High profile clients affected by the outage included Lycos who said that the Lycos Network of sites, including portal site Lycos.com, website hosting services Tripod.com and Angelfire.com, as well as the company's free Lycos Mail e-mail service, had been knocked offline.
A message posted on the web site of SureSupport, a web hosting support provider, advised that the SAVVIS data center facility team has reported that the Boston data center is isolated due to a circuit related issue.'
According to CBC News Online, the outage occurred when two SAVVIS data centers, B01 and B02, were damaged by construction workers the previous night.
By 3pm, service had been partly restored to the facility, but because the problem had not been fully resolved, packet loss and slower access was experienced.
"This was a 100 per cent connectivity problem with Savvis," CNet quoted Kathy O'Reilly, Lycos' public relations director as saying. "We contracted with them for 99.7 per cent of our hosting and network services, and they guaranteed their service. This was a major failure on their part."