At 16:42 on the 29th October we were alerted to the fact our main file server appeared to be offline. This meant that customers' uploaded files were unavailable. Once it was confirmed that the file server was not accessible, we immediately instigated our recovery plan and brought the standby file server online. We then attached the network storage to it, thus restoring access to customer uploaded files. Services were brought back up by 17:32.

On further investigation, we noticed that the server detected that it had entered an inconsistent state and as a result, halted itself as a safety measure. This an extremely rare occurrence and is the first time we have encountered this behaviour since SiteMaker began. However, this is the reason we have redundant hardware enabling us to quickly fail over to our standby system and recover services rapidly.

As a precaution, we have updated the operating systems of the file servers and, although we have no reason to suspect any damage, we are running a full diagnostics on the hardware.