A risky marketing stunt or a real "epic fail"?

Apr 18, 2016 08:10 GMT  ·  By

UPDATE: The incident has been confirmed, and it appears that 123-Reg has accidentally deleted the VPS servers for some of its clients. Below is the original article, written before some of the 123-Reg emails reached their customers and clarified the situation.

InnMaster, a company selling a Hospitality Management Software Suite of the same name, has accused the UK's largest hosting provider and domain registrar 123-Reg of deleting its website along with those of other clients, via a "rogue script."

According to 123-Reg's support page, the company noticed a problem with its service on Saturday morning, at around 10 AM GMT. The company classified this incident as "VPS connectivity issues," and in five updates posted on its website, it failed to elaborate on the exact problem that caused the service to go down for some of its clients.

At the time of writing this article, the issue remains unresolved, with no new updates on the company's status page, Facebook and Twitter accounts.

InnMaster: 123-Reg accidentally deleted our website

Late Sunday night, a post on InnMaster's blog offered a glimpse into what happened. InnMaster's tech staff claims that they had to rebuild their entire service on a new server after 123-Reg failed to provide any details. With no actual evidence or details from 123-Reg, InnMaster has speculated on the issue affecting their service.

  At 7am on Saturday morning someone at our hosting provider ran a script that had a catastrophic error in it. The result was that the script deleted the servers and websites of all their customers! This is a major embarrassment for a large web hosting group and judging by what we have seen on Twitter it has left some of their customers who had no backup or emergency plan with no website and potentially no business any more! - We can assure you, we are not one of those!  

InnMaster went on to say they used one of their daily backups, taken on Friday, at midnight, to restore their service on a new server. The company is announcing this since it may take some time to propagate the new DNS entry to all of its clients trying to access its service.

The situation seems somewhat similar to what we reported last week, when a hosting provider representative said he mistakenly deleted his entire company thanks to a "rogue script." In the end, the whole story proved to be fake, with the man behind it having a good laugh at everyone's expense.

We'll follow this subject and update the article if 123-Reg decides to answer InnMaster's serious accusations.

UPDATE: Ian Hamilton and James Tanner have told Softpedia that 123-Reg has actually deleted all VPS servers and is now in the process of restoring some of their data from backups. The email 123-Reg sent customers is available here, and it appears that InnMasters' accusations are not accusations at all, with the latter being one of the first companies that received the 123-Reg clarification email. We were misled into thinking this was an accusation because InnMasters' blog post failed to specify the source of their information as being the 123-Reg email.  

123-Reg status page and updates regarding this incident
123-Reg status page and updates regarding this incident

Photo Gallery (2 Images)

123-Reg accused of deleting customer websites
123-Reg status page and updates regarding this incident
Open gallery