Spaceship Blog

Spaceship service outage update

Updated on
3 min read
Spaceship service outage update

On August 13, we experienced a major service outage that impacted a number of Spaceship services.

The cause was a cooling system failure at the RadiusDC: Phoenix data center, which hosts some essential Spaceship operations. This forced us to take services offline to protect customer infrastructure from overheating and possible damage.

Everything affected by the incident has now been restored, and our teams continue to monitor systems closely to ensure they remain stable.

We are deeply sorry for the impact on customers who depend on us for their websites, email, and other online services. The disruption this caused, and the circumstances behind it, are being taken extremely seriously.

What happened

The incident began when cooling systems failed at the Phoenix data center due to a major storm, causing temperatures around our infrastructure to reach critical levels.

Continuing to operate systems in such conditions risked equipment overheating and suffering longer-term and catastrophic damage. Taking services offline caused significant disruption, but it was necessary to protect our customers’ infrastructure.

Keeping equipment offline until the cooling systems were back online also gave temperatures time to return to safe levels before recovery began. This helped avoid creating further problems that could have further prolonged an already serious incident.

How customers were affected

The outage affected services including Shared, VPS, email forwarding, and Spacemail. Spaceship.com remained online throughout the incident.

Here is a breakdown of how the situation affected key products and services:

Hosting operations

Customer access to websites and hosting services was affected, with many customer websites unavailable, slow, or returning errors. Some billing operations were also unavailable after the system responsible for processing them was taken offline during the incident.

EasyWP

EasyWP’s Dashboard and customer websites were disrupted. During recovery, some customer websites remained unavailable after EasyWP.com and the Dashboard were restored, with some returning database connection errors.

Spacemail

Email services were also disrupted. Affected customers were unable to send email, and incoming email could not be delivered while the relevant servers were offline.

Importantly, this did not mean incoming messages were automatically lost. Mail providers normally make further delivery attempts when a receiving server is temporarily unavailable. So messages would arrive, but later than usual.

How we restored services

RadiusDC began restoring its cooling capacity as soon as possible, while temporary chillers were installed and directed into our area of the data center to help reduce temperatures.

Our teams worked continuously on site alongside RadiusDC to restore cooling. We only began bringing services back online once temperatures had returned to safe operating levels, and we were confident there was no risk of overheating or longer-term damage.

With safe operating conditions restored, we began a controlled recovery across our infrastructure. This needed to happen progressively, so customers saw different services return at different times.

Why services were restored in stages

The scale of the incident meant different parts of our platform were disrupted at the same time. While customers experience these as separate services, the data center incident affected the infrastructure involved in delivering a number of them.

Services like hosting and email rely on multiple layers of technology, including servers, networks, storage, and databases. Restoring them meant bringing these different elements back online in the right order, rather than simply switching everything back on at once.

What happens next

We take this disruption and its impact on our customers very seriously. 

Our teams are conducting a thorough review of the situation to strengthen our systems and to ensure that similar incidents do not happen again.

We will be completely transparent about what we learn and will share the results with you, along with the actions we are taking.

CORRECTION: Our data center operator is RadiusDC, not PhoenixNAP as referenced in several, early posts on X on 13 August. PhoenixNAP is not involved in this incident.

Profile picture of Hillan Klein
Written by

Hillan Klein

Chief Executive Officer
More articles by Hillan Klein

Rate this article

4.16/531 Reviews
Share this article

Comments (17)

Write a comment
  • Profile picture of Luke Carter

    Luke Carter

    Aug 17, 2026

    I understand that outages happen, and I appreciate how quickly the team restored services. However, I recall seeing an “Add recovery email” prompt in the Spaceship hosting manager for quite some time, even after a recovery email had already been added.
    More than 10 characters required.
    Your identity for public display.
    Providing your email address is optional. It will not be shared with third parties.
    • Profile picture of Olga, Hosting Product Operations Specialist

      Olga, Hosting Product Operations Specialist

      Aug 18, 2026

      Appreciated, and thanks for reporting this. A recovery-email prompt that keeps appearing after you've already added one isn't expected, so we'd like to look into it directly. Please contact our Support team with your account details — they'll confirm the recovery email is saved correctly on our side and investigate why the prompt is still showing for you.
  • Profile picture of Yves Gaston G. PIERRE

    Yves Gaston G. PIERRE

    Aug 17, 2026

    Je trouve qu'au niveau commercial vous pourriez prévoir une compensation pour vos clients même si elle n'est que symbolique. parfois il y a des gestes tout simple démontre que vous désirez réellement poser un acte positif. il est plus que probable que tu ne liras pas mon texte, parce que je comprends c'est que derrière cette structure se trouve une personne à la base, c'est dommage. moi je vous ai choisi parce que j'ai plus de moyens et que je me bats au niveau de mon association d'étudiant .
    More than 10 characters required.
    Your identity for public display.
    Providing your email address is optional. It will not be shared with third parties.
  • Profile picture of Dennis Davison

    Dennis Davison

    Aug 16, 2026

    I am having issues with cPanel (xxx.xxx + all of my other sites) I cannot create or edit files. I am getting "our connection is not private Attackers might be trying to steal your information from serverxxx.xxxx.xxx.xxx (for example, passwords, messages, or credit cards). Learn more about this warning net::ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID" 2x in 1 month. Really not feeling comfortable with service if server is unsafe.
    More than 10 characters required.
    Your identity for public display.
    Providing your email address is optional. It will not be shared with third parties.
    • Profile picture of Olga, Hosting Product Operations Specialist

      Olga, Hosting Product Operations Specialist

      Aug 18, 2026

      Sorry for the worry here. That error (ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID) is a certificate-trust warning — the browser couldn't verify the certificate for that address — rather than proof the server is unsafe, and the connection stays encrypted. It can come from a few different things, including something we may need to fix on the server side, so we'd rather check it directly than guess. Please send our Support team your domain and a screenshot of the full warning (including the server address shown).
  • Profile picture of Andre

    Andre

    Aug 15, 2026

    Thank you! Your service is solid!
    More than 10 characters required.
    Your identity for public display.
    Providing your email address is optional. It will not be shared with third parties.
  • Profile picture of Prakhar

    Prakhar

    Aug 15, 2026

    Thanks for being honest about the incident. It actually makes me trust you more, not less.
    More than 10 characters required.
    Your identity for public display.
    Providing your email address is optional. It will not be shared with third parties.
  • Profile picture of Hope Adeniran

    Hope Adeniran

    Aug 15, 2026

    Okay. Glad we're back.
    More than 10 characters required.
    Your identity for public display.
    Providing your email address is optional. It will not be shared with third parties.
  • Profile picture of Serge D.

    Serge D.

    Aug 15, 2026

    As a famous proverb goes, apologies after damage are often ill-timed. This raises the question: what prevented the initial infrastructure design, considering the distribution of services across various geographically remote data centers?
    More than 10 characters required.
    Your identity for public display.
    Providing your email address is optional. It will not be shared with third parties.
  • Profile picture of Justin

    Justin

    Aug 15, 2026

    Spaceship advertises a monthly 99.99% uptime guarantee for hosting. By my count this was an approximately 12-hour incident, which translates to a maximum uptime of 98.4% for August. How do you intend to honor your guarantee?
    More than 10 characters required.
    Your identity for public display.
    Providing your email address is optional. It will not be shared with third parties.
    • Profile picture of Olga, Hosting Product Operations Specialist

      Olga, Hosting Product Operations Specialist

      Aug 18, 2026

      You're right that this took affected services below our 99.99% monthly guarantee, and we're sorry. The cause was a cooling system failure at our Phoenix data center during a major storm, which forced us to take services offline to protect customer infrastructure from overheating. This was a one-off event, not something we've experienced before. We're completing a full review and putting measures in place to make sure it doesn't happen again. If you were affected, please reach out to our Support
  • Profile picture of Arturo Rabino

    Arturo Rabino

    Aug 15, 2026

    I didn't noticed any outage, it's aug 15 today in asia and i received this after I woke up
    More than 10 characters required.
    Your identity for public display.
    Providing your email address is optional. It will not be shared with third parties.
  • Profile picture of Mike

    Mike

    Aug 14, 2026

    I appreciate the transparency, but this indicates that Spaceship is hosted solely in one data center. Are there plans to enhance redundancy?
    More than 10 characters required.
    Your identity for public display.
    Providing your email address is optional. It will not be shared with third parties.
  • Profile picture of Zek

    Zek

    Aug 14, 2026

    I can't image how stressful this has been for you guys... Good job everyone!
    More than 10 characters required.
    Your identity for public display.
    Providing your email address is optional. It will not be shared with third parties.
  • Profile picture of Ritchy

    Ritchy

    Aug 14, 2026

    Thanks for the update!
    More than 10 characters required.
    Your identity for public display.
    Providing your email address is optional. It will not be shared with third parties.
  • Profile picture of Seventh Ray

    Seventh Ray

    Aug 14, 2026

    Why was there no redundancy? If one data center fails, there should be a backup data center that kicks in. Should we be moving to a service provider who doesn't rely on a single data center?
    More than 10 characters required.
    Your identity for public display.
    Providing your email address is optional. It will not be shared with third parties.
    • Profile picture of Johnny

      Johnny

      Aug 21, 2026

      Why don’t they consider having a second MX record in another friendly DC for the SpaceMail service?I am suprised that both existing MX records are mazbe just 2 VMs in the same (v)LAN.

Share your thoughts

More than 10 characters required.
Your identity for public display.
Providing your email address is optional. It will not be shared with third parties.

Help us improve our blog

Share your thoughts in a quick two-minute survey.

A valid email is required