Datacenter Customers Get £1 Million Settlement

A federal judge in Maryland today approved a £1.07 million ($1.67 million USD) settlement today for nearly 5,500 customers of NaviSite, a datacenter that suffered long downtime after several servers were accidentally unplugged.

NaviSite had told its customers to expect downtime for a server upgrade. Instead of upgrading the servers, however, they were unplugged when the company attempted to move them to a new location.

Nearly 200,000 websites suffered slow performance or were completely unavailable for as little as a few days to several weeks. The customers received four times their monthly bill in the settlement. The largest amount won by any one customer was £6,446 ($10,000 USD).

For ecommerce sites that lost customers, however, the equivalent of a few month’s free hosting won’t make up for the lost business. Some companies report losing as many as half their clients because of the outage.

The lead lawyer in the case, Stuart A. Davidson, made this comment:

Things just went completely awry. It may not be that big of a deal for maybe a book club … but for companies that actually sell, like e-commerce companies, being down for one hour, much less a day or weeks or more….

Source: Maryland Daily Record