Namecheap Sites Go Dark for 15 Hours After Phoenix Data Centre Cooling Failure; 410,000 Lose Power in Northern Illinois

A mechanical failure at a single Phoenix data centre removed websites, email and control panels from the internet for much of Thursday, in an incident that reached well beyond the customers of any one provider. Separately, severe storms cut electricity to roughly 410,000 customers across northern Illinois, with utility crews still rebuilding parts of the network days later.

A cooling failure in Phoenix took hosting, email and DNS management offline

Engadget reported that Namecheap attributed the disruption to “a failure of cooling systems” at its Phoenix data centre, with hosting plans, EasyWP, DNS and email clients affected, along with the company’s own website. Chief executive Hillan Klein said on X that, based on conditions at the time, the company anticipated bringing customer services back online at approximately 3:00pm to 3:30pm ET. The PhoenixNAP facility reported “elevated white space temperatures” following damage from heavy overnight storms in the city.

Restoration took considerably longer than that first estimate. TechRadar Pro reported that the incident took around 15 hours to repair in full: problems surfaced at about midday ET, two of the facility’s four chillers were returned to service, core databases came back at approximately 5:30pm ET, and full service was restored at 3:50am ET. Because the company’s own helpdesk was affected, support staff were unable to reply to live chat and email during the outage. Klein said the company would publish a post-mortem covering “what led to it, where our existing safeguards and protocols failed, how we responded,” and told customers: “we failed you today.”

The incident was not confined to one brand. HostingJournalist reported that the facility is operated by RadiusDC, with phoenixNAP as a tenant, and that Hosting.com separately reported servers unavailable at its Phoenix location. Namecheap said DNS resolution continued to work while DNS management was affected — a distinction that matters, since it left some customers online but unable to change anything. Recovery was staged deliberately: physical network devices first, then virtual network infrastructure, then customer services.

For anyone who depends on a single provider for hosting, email and DNS control at once, the practical lesson is that these functions can share a failure domain even when they look like separate products. You can follow the services involved on the Status Is Down pages for Namecheap and Hosting.com, or browse the wider web and cloud hosting, domain registrar and webmail categories.

Northern Illinois storms left 410,000 without power, with restoration running into the weekend

Severe storms earlier in the week cut electricity to a far larger number of customers across northern Illinois, and utility crews were still rebuilding parts of the network on Thursday.

The Chicago Tribune reported that about 52,000 Chicago-area customers, mostly in the south and southwest suburbs, remained without power as of 3pm Thursday. Jeremy Smith, ComEd’s vice-president of distribution operations, said he expected about 99% of customers to be restored by 11pm on Saturday, adding: “There will be pockets that go into Sunday.” Homewood’s mayor, Rich Hofeld, said the utility had told him roughly 58% of the village remained without power that morning, with Village Hall running a skeleton staff and no air conditioning.

Shaw Local’s The Herald-News reported the territory-wide figure: nearly 410,000 ComEd customers lost power, with 85% restored by late afternoon. In Will County alone, ComEd spokesman David O’Dowd said more than 105,000 customers were affected at peak, falling to a little over 11,000 by late Thursday afternoon — an 89% restoration rate. The commercial effects were tangible: a filling station in Joliet traded cash-only for a third day, could not sell fuel at all without power, recorded sales on paper and cut its hours to daylight only.

Illinois is having an extraordinary storm season. ComEd described this as its 20th major weather event of the year, and the National Weather Service told the Tribune that the state is approaching 200 tornadoes in a single year, against an average of 54 annually between 1990 and 2020. You can track the utility on the Status Is Down ComEd page or across the energy, electricity and gas category.

Monitoring the services you depend on

Both incidents began with physical infrastructure — a cooling plant and a storm-damaged distribution network — and both were visible to customers long before they were explained. Status Is Down tracks reported disruptions across thousands of services and websites so you can see when something you rely on starts failing, rather than finding out from a status page after the fact. You can watch live activity on the real-time outage view, search the website directory and service directory, read earlier reporting in the article archive, compare plans and pricing, and create an account to follow the specific services that matter to your work.

Sources

• Engadget — Hosting provider Namecheap is down after data center cooling failure
• TechRadar Pro — ‘We failed you today’: Namecheap down for several hours after a data center cooling failure
• HostingJournalist — Namecheap, Hosting.com Hit by Phoenix Data Center Outage
• Chicago Tribune — ComEd said most electricity should be restored in Southland by Saturday night
• Shaw Local, The Herald-News — Hot days, dark nights and spoiled food: Waiting in Will County for electricity to come back after the storm

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