Rackspace

According to sources, network peering problem caused Rackspace outage affecting many sites. Company’s data center at Dallas who had many outages due to power problems this year is experiencing downtime for some sites this time too but company sources claim that this problem originated outside Dallas data center.
A company employee tweeted on his status page that they had a network problem at peering location outside Dallas data center. The problem lasted for half an hour from 3:42 p.m. to 4:13 p.m.
It might be possible that Rackspace has a routing loop problem in which packets continuously routed in an endless circle. This problem occurs due to configuration problems and hardware failures.
Peering allows you to exchange large amount of traffic and saves money by direct connectivity. The interruption can disrupt access to sites hosted on the peering partners’ network.
For Cloud Sites, this was the second outage during past six weeks. Last time, it experienced outage when Dallas data center lost power when experts were inspecting power distribution units (PDUs) on 3rd November.  This time there were no problems regarding power. The Dallas data center had experienced outages on 29th June and 7th July as well.
Customers are unhappy with the performance of Rackspace. TechCrunch says generally the company is responsive with issues but this is another black eye for them. Managing Director Seigler said they have decided to get a backup version until Rackspace proves to be more reliable. Other sites affected included Laughing Squid Web hosting and 37 signals.