OVH, the largest hosting provider in Europe and the third largest in the world, went offline earlier today after what appears to be routing configuration issues during scheduled maintenance.

OVH has 32 data centers with more than 300,000 servers on four continents and a total network capacity of 20 Tbit/s.

It provides web hosting, cloud computing services and dedicated servers to 1,300,000 business customers worldwide.

Failure caused by bad router configuration

“We will be servicing our routers at VIN DC to improve our routing,” the company said on its status page before the servers went down.

“Maintenance is scheduled for 13/Oct/21 from 9:00 AM to 10:30 AM (UTC+2). No impact expected, device will be isolated prior to change.”

However, unknown issues that occurred during the scheduled maintenance made the hosting provider’s servers unreachable, causing customer sites to shut down as well.



“After a human error during the reconfiguration of the network on our DC to VH (US-EST), we have a problem with the whole backbone. We are going to isolate the DC VH and then fix the conf,” OVH founder Octave Klaba explained.

“Over the past few days, the intensity of DDoS attacks has increased significantly. We have decided to increase our DDoS throughput by adding new infrastructures in our DC VH (US-EST). the network. “

According to reports [1, 2], the ongoing outage only impacts the IPv4 infrastructure, with IPv6 infrastructure still active and reachable over the internet.

When trying to connect to the OVH website, users are currently seeing "Error 503: Backend unavailable" errors explaining that "This type of error usually results of an unavailability of servers behind IP Load Balancing."

Visitors are asked to refresh the site or return in a few minutes and reach out to OVH's support team if the problem persists.

The hosting provider's status page also went down with the company's servers during the maintenance process, with the page now displaying "The connection has timed out. An error occurred during a connection to status.ovh.com," errors.

Due to these problems experienced in OVH, our site experienced an access problem for an hour and the services did not work.

This topic is an excerpt to report the outage on our site. Source