Last month, much of pricey "managed hosting" provider Rackspace's Dallas-area datacenter went offline because of a system failure related to power outages and a traffic accident. Rackspace, which prides itself on 100 percent network uptime, is one of the most expensive hosting providers out there. You get what you pay for. Most customers enthusiastically recommend them, as they rarely go offline. Or used to. The past month has not been good for Rackspace's reputation. Over this past weekend, they experienced another power failure at the same Texas datacenter. During the failure, they "experienced an increase in operating temperature." After "speaking with customers," Rackspace shut down some servers until they could resolve the situation. Not a good sign. Cooling issues were what brought the center down last time. And today, more problems!

VeriFone, a maker of credit-card readers, will restate three quarters' worth of earnings due to "accounting errors" in how it counted its inventories, the WSJ reports. Share prices dropped $22 to $26.03, a 45.8 percent freefall. New results will lower earnings by nearly $30 million.

STUCK IN A CAB ON FIFTH AVE, NEW YORK — New York cabbies don't like change, unless it's the kind you tell them to keep. Nevertheless, if you hit New York for the holidays this year, you might find yourself in a cab with a computer display installed in the barrier between you and the driver. It's not very useful, featuring a little local TV, Zagat ratings and a lot of advertisements. But some of you out there might find they're good for a perverse pleasure. Hacking around. That's the stuck-in-traffic entertainment blogger Billy Chasen went for.

If we're going to make fun of CNBC's inability to spell, we should probably poke fun at Fox Business News as well. In a screenshot from earlier today, the Dow Jones Inustrial Average must be an innovation from News Corp. TVNewser has an interesting quote from an ex-CNBCer:

Earlier this year PayPal introduced a security fob that generates a six-digit code every 30 seconds, meant as an additional layer of protection against online identity thieves. However, one user discovered a bug that makes the key useless in certain situations. By entering his valid PayPal login and password, answering a security question and entering ANY six-digit number, he can make a purchase. eBay and PayPal have been unable to reproduce the flaw, but Romero stands by his statement, claiming the key doesn't work as advertised. "For someone who's paid money for a Security Key and is thinking their wife or brother can't get into their account because they don't have the key fob ... they're not getting the security that they assume they have."

An Apple ad bashing Microsoft's Vista OS, captured in the video above, became a viral sensation almost immediately after its launch, AdWeek reports. Running on CNET, Engadget and PCWorld, video of the the ad caught on with YouTube and blogs, including Valleywag. The only problem? While Vista may crash your PC, according to Apple, Apple's ad tended to crash users' browsers. Engadget editor Ryan Block went so far as to pull the ad temporarily and apologize to readers.

A reader reports Sears.com has been down for much of Black Friday, the most overhyped shopping day of the year. They never learn, do they? Last year, Macy's and Wal-Mart saw outages. The Sears site is currently displaying a "high traffic volume" excuse page. Anyone know what knocked the site offline? Nothing on this year's Black Friday list of specials strikes me as a must-click.

A tipster sent us the most comprehensive incident report to date on the downtime at Rackspace's Grapevine, Texas datacenter. Things happened pretty much as we reported. Though this was the third outage in two days, from what we can tell, it was unrelated to the others. The first two outages were caused by failing bits of Rackspace's internal power distribution network. The third, much larger outage was caused by a traffic accident. A summary of the report's findings, after the jump.

After Rackspace experienced two power issues Sunday and Monday, a truck collided with a power transformer on the side of its Dallas-area data center in Grapevine, Texas. As a result, power was lost again. Two of the chillers that keep the servers cool failed to restart and a number of servers were taken offline to prevent heat damage. As far as we know, all servers are back up and functioning and Rackspace is very apologetic. Now, everyone is asking "how did this happen?" The short answer: Low blood sugar. Find out more sweet details after the jump.

An accident near Rackspace's Dallas datacenter sparked a late-night Web crisis, downing Internet service providers from Texas to California and bringing down 37signals' Web-based software suite, on which many startups depend for coordinating their work. But Rackspace worked fast to fix the cause of the outage — balky chillers which failed to start when switched to backup power, causing the datacenter to overheat — and by midnight, most of Rackspace's hosted websites were back online. Here's the apology note from Rackspace CEO Lanham Napier, forwarded to us by a customer.

The most recent email to customers from Rackspace, the Texas Web host whose datacenter outage in Dallas downed some of the Web's most useful websites:

There are a lot of posts popping up from various Rackspace customers apologizing to their customers and readers for the Web host's downtime caused by an errant truck. Here is a selection:

37signals

This update sent to us by a customer of Rackspace, the Texas Web host which temporarily lost a datacenter when a truck collided with a nearby power transformer. Posted on my.rackspace.com, the company's customer support website, it reveals this was the third power issue in two days: one Sunday morning, one Monday morning and another this evening. Not all customers were affected by all three outages, but three outages at one hosting facility is not good.

A tipster writes that his ISP blamed a service disruption on Rackspace issues.

Rackspace, which promises 100 percent network uptime, was tied with two other companies for "most reliable webhost" in September 2007 according to Netcraft. We doubt the company will be number one this month.

Previously:
Truck driver in Texas kills all the websites you really use

Remember the power mishap in July that brought down 365 Main, the San Francisco datacenter? A similar incident took place today at the Dallas datacenter of Rackspace, a San Antonio, Texas-based firm which serves several local Web outfits. Unlike the July outage, which killed all the websites we waste time with — LiveJournal, Craigslist, and so on — this one took out some sites which really mattered. Laughing Squid, Scott Beale's popular Web-hosting company, went down, taking a long list of customers with it, and 37signals, the maker of Web-based software, went out — a serious matter, since 37signals actually charges for using its software. So what exactly happened at Rackspace?

Sometimes a screenshot is worth 1,000 words.

Blogger Muhammad Saleem noticed that Stumbleupon has been down for over an hour. You can reach Stumbleupon.com, but if you click the "stumble" button on the service's downloadable toolbar, nothing happens. We would blame this on growing pains, but the company was bought by eBay earlier this year. Anyone else having trouble? Let us know.

First it was the Colorado Rockies who couldn't handle the thousands of Bostonians wishing to buy tickets to see their team crush the mile-high dreams of Rockies fans. Now, a rush of advance purchasers has knocked the 2008 Beijing Olympics ticket server offline. [WSJ]