Update: No servers, no comment at Financial Times
Cable & Wireless theft takes out Sainsbury’s as well
By Mike Simons | Published 13:14, 10 July 08
The Financial Times web site, FT.com, and online shopping site Sainsbury's were left struggling to cope after the theft of equipment at a hosting centre, which is believed to have been unmanned.
Fibre optics, routers, servers and switches were removed from the site by thieves, who police believe were after scrap metal.
The publisher was left unable to publish new articles or update data on its site following the thefts which took place at a Cable & Wireless network site, near to one of its datacentres in Watford, north of London.
Instead the FT.com site was earlier today (10 July) being run on backup facilities in the United States.
By mid afternoon the site was fully restored. A company representative said, “There was a reduced FT.com service on 10 July due to equipment being stolen over night from our third party hosted datacentre site. Full functionality has now been restored and we would like to apologise for any inconvenience caused to our customers and readers.
Sainsbury’s, meanwhile, had to cope with the third major outage in two months.
A message this morning apologised to customers who “are unable to get access to our groceries site at the moment. This is due to a technical problem that our internet providers, Cable & Wireless, are experiencing.”
Sainbury’s was able to carry on deliveries as usual and its site was restored this afternoon.
Cable and Wireless itself was tight lipped about the break in. The hosting provider would not confirm which of its customers were affected or how the theft occurred.
A representative said “Cable & Wireless are experiencing some network issues due to the loss of a number of servers following a break-in at our site in Watford. This being investigated and is now a police matter.
“We have employed a specialist engineer to minimise the loss to our customers. We can't comment on individual customers.”
Earlier this year, Norwich Union signed a £300 million, six year deal with Cable & Wireless. In 2006 Cable & Wireless signed a contract to provide the new Police National Network (PNN3) in a deal worth £75 million over five years.
