Rackspace goes down and takes us all with it

A whole bunch of tech sites were down for a time today when Rackspace had a server issue at their Dallas Fort Worth data center.

In addition to the Inquisitr, Mashable, TechCrunch and Threadless were among the potential thousands of sites temporarily offline due to the Rackspace outage. The outage occurred between 4:45 and 5:15pm EST, and Rackspace posted a timeline on their status blog:

As of 3:45 PM CST, we are currently experiencing an issue within our Dallas / Fort Worth data center. We are investigating the issue and will post an update momentarily.

UPDATE: As of 3:55 PM CST, to clarify: This is a networking issue affecting Cloud Sites in our DFW data center.

UPDATE: As of 4:05 PM CST, networking engineers are quickly working to address this issue. We should have a resolution shortly.

UPDATE: As of 4:14 PM CST, another point of clarification: This is not a power issue in DFW, all power is confirmed up and has not been down. This is a networking issue.

UPDATE: As of 4:15 PM CST, the networking issue affecting our DFW data center has now been resolved. Networking connectivity for Cloud Sites in our DFW data center has been restored.

The latest tweet explaining the outage from @rackspace doesn’t offer much in the way of details, but promises more:

We had a network issue at a peering location outside our datacenter facilities. The network is back up. More details to come.

The outage wasn’t a bad thing for all tech blogs, though- The Next Web kind of dug it:

A small word of condolence to our lovely compatriots Mashable and TechCrunch. But I must say, that we are enjoying the traffic at their expense.

I don’t imagine sites that use the service for e-commerce purposes are as amused by the outage, however brief, in the crucial couple of hours leading up to Christmas shipping deadlines.