Outage this afternoon

Today around 4:45pm EST our hosting provider Rackspace experienced an outage at one of our data centres and as a result FreshBooks was unavailable for 28 minutes (until about 5:15pm EST). We have been in touch with Rackspace to determine the cause of the outage. However, at this time, we don’t have any further details.

Since the downtime was short, we opted not to switch to our backup data centre. If we are in this situation again and an outage was prolonged, we do have an alternate data centre we can use to restore service to the FreshBooks application.

We put a high value on always being there for you. We are truly sorry for the inconvenience. If this outage affected you, please contact us and we will try to make it up to you. Please note (and we recognize this isn’t the best message to send!) it is presently Friday afternoon at 5:30 PM, and the weekend starts in about half an hour. So if we don’t get back to your today, we will first thing Monday. As it stands now though, we were able to answer a slew of phone calls and we seem to be on top of email, but again, feel free to drop us a note if you were impacted and thanks again for your understanding.

Finally, for future reference, we have a Status Blog which gives real-time updates of the FreshBooks service in the event of an outage like this afternoon’s.