Customers furious as web hosting company 123-reg accidentally deletes hundreds of websites from the internet



The web hosting service 123-reg has deleted customers' websites after a clean-up error occurred at the weekend


A popular internet company is facing the wrath of its customers today after mistakenly deleting huge amounts of data over the weekend.
It accidentally knocked an unspecified number of VPS (virtual private servers) offline, meaning owners and visitors couldn't access their websites.
123-reg.com provides hosting services for websites and email accounts and has been working since Saturday morning to repair the damage.
In the first of seven updates posted on its support page , the company stated:
"This morning, our teams were made aware of issues affecting the performance of our VPS product. Our teams are continuing to investigate which has led to some customers experiencing denigrated service levels."



By the fourth update, things were getting a bit more serious:
"Our teams are continuing to work to restore affected VPS services back to normal throughout the evening and night, using both internal and external experts.
If you are currently offline and would like to restore from your own backup to save time we can set you up a new VPS image. Please let our support teams know."
As of Monday afternoon, the issue had still not been resolved.


The company informed its customers with an email over the weekend to try and explain what happened.
"As part of a clean-up process on the 123-reg VPS platform, a script was run at 7am on 16.04.16. This script is run to show us the number of machines active against the master database.
"An error on the script showed 'zero-records' response from the database for some live VPS. For those customers, this created a 'failure' scenario - showing no VM's and effectively deleting what was on the host. As a result of our team's investigations, we can conclude that the issues faced having resulted in some data loss for some customers."


The company says it is working hard to try and reverse the error.
"Our teams have been working long into the night to restore as much as we possibly can. We have also invested in external consultants to recover, in the best way possible."
123-reg has about 800,000 customers in the UK and hasn't said how many were affected, although it claims it is a "small proportion".

http://www.mirror.co.uk/tech/custome...ompany-7780626
If you have them as a provider, I can get you a discount code at hostgator or one.com...