Outage at web hosting service SmartyHost hits hundreds of customers

An outage at SmartyHost, the web hosting service owned and operated by business software giant MYOB, has affected hundreds of users over the last 24 hours.

The outage appears to have started on 3 September at 8:40pm AEST, with customers unable to accesses their websites and email.

On the status update section of its website, SmartyHost laid the blame for the outage at the feet of its third-party service provider, Optus.

“An Optus failure is still affecting a number of our customers. Optus technicians are currently working on the issue. We apologise for the inconvenience and thank you for your continued patience while we resolve this issue,” the company said in an update at 9:23am this morning.

However, the company said at 11:22am that all issues had been resolved and it was now running tests to confirm the stability of the service.

Embarrassingly for SmartyHost, the outage came just one day after the company launched a new hosting service as part of its Platinum Project upgrade.

“This outage didn’t affect clients on our new hosting system that we’re calling Platinum,” a spokesperson said. “Over the next couple of months we’ll be migrating all clients to Platinum. It delivers increased redundancy and load balancing, all the behind-the-scenes technology that will make online business easier for our clients.”