WebCentral suffers lengthy outage

Melbourne IT today admitted websites belonging to a number of customers of its WebCentral brand went down over the weekend, following a data corruption issue in its storage systems.

Customers had been complaining online about the issue since Friday morning, with updates to the problem being posted online over the weekend. "This is a major, major issue for our business," wrote one aggrieved customer on broadband information site Whirlpool.

"WebCentral, a brand of the Melbourne IT Group, reported today that it had experienced data corruption in one of its shared storage devices on Friday 20 March and that the cause of the incident was resolved on Saturday," the company said in a statement this afternoon.

"Due to redundancy within the storage systems, the problem was isolated and impacted a small percentage of the customer base."

Melbourne IT's main storage vendor is IBM, although the domain and hosting company didn't mention Big Blue in its statement, saying only that supporting vendors had responded proactively and quickly to address the problem.

"The company confirmed that the recovery process is in progress and that customers had been restored over the weekend," Melbourne IT's statement said. "Secondary effects of server corruption have been identified and are being resolved."