THE PLANET IS A DEDICATED SERVER PROVIDER THAT hosts websites for thousands of customers world-wide.  They are located in Texas and have six separate sites where their servers are operating.

Saturday evening and fire in an electrical room caused an electrical explosion that knocked out three walls of the room containing the electrical equipment and brought operations in that facility to a halt.

Fortunately none of the servers themselves were damaged by the fire, but approximately 9,000 websites were knocked offline.  The outage did not affect their other server locations and they expected to have full service restored by late Monday evening.

An official with the company released the following statement on Saturday night:

This evening at 4:55pm CDT in our H1 data center, electrical gear shorted, creating an explosion and fire that knocked down three walls surrounding our electrical equipment room. Thankfully, no one was injured. In addition, no customer servers were damaged or lost.

We have just been allowed into the building to physically inspect the damage. Early indications are that the short was in a high-volume wire conduit. We were not allowed to activate our backup generator plan based on instructions from the fire department.

This is a significant outage, impacting approximately 9,000 servers and 7,500 customers. All members of our support team are in, and all vendors who supply us with data center equipment are on site. Our initial assessment, although early, points to being able to have some service restored by mid-afternoon on Sunday. Rest assured we are working around the clock.

We are in the process of communicating with all affected customers. we are planning to post updates every hour via our forum and in our customer portal. Our interactive voice response system is updating customers as well.

There is no impact in any of our other five data centers

They have backup generators, but the Houston fire marshal prohibited using them until a full inspection of the electrical system was completed.  Early this morning the generators were turned on and the servers are beginning to come online, but it will be later on Monday night before full service is restored.

The Houston Chronicle has a late report HERE. 

If you have been having a problem accessing some of your favorite websites since yesterday, it might well be that they are hosted by The Planet.  Firegeezer is hosted by a different company and is not affected by this.

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