When one of open source’s favorite cloud hosts went dark, even LWN.net blinked. Here’s what happened—and why it matters.
A power outage at Newark’s 165 Halsey Street data center Sunday morning that lasted throughout the day continued to cause significant service disruptions through much of Monday, with some disruptions continuing on Tuesday. The cloud platform provider Linode was by far the most affected by the outage, with practically everything in the company’s portfolio of services impacted, which includes infrastructure, web hosting, storage, Kubernetes deployments, and more.
The issues in New Jersey triggered outages at other data center locations used by Linode due to interdependencies, including in Dallas, Fremont, Sydney, Tokyo, Toronto, and Washington. The underlying cause was a failure of cooling systems following the power outage. Even after utility power was restored, extended downtimes continued as systems required gradual and controlled reactivation to prevent hardware damage.
As Linode’s tech teams worked on resolving issues and restoring service, the company began providing updates online but have not yet issued a detailed post-mortem, restoration timeline, or an all clear as of this report. However, there have been no new updates reported on Tuesday, indicating that the situation is now under control.
The first news that we saw here at FOSS Force of the power outage and Linode’s resulting struggles was on Monday morning, when we ran across a post by LWN.net’s Executive Editor Jonathan Corbet on the Linux news site LWN.net called “LWN Is Back.”
“The good folks at Linode still have not managed to fix whatever broke in their data center, so we are running on an emergency backup server. Things seem to be working, but the occasional glitch is to be expected. Please accept our apologies for the extended downtime!” was the entirety of that post.
Since then, normalcy seems to have returned to LWN, as the post has been appended with: “Update: we’re back on the regular production server, and all seems stable now.”
Linode: An Open Rock
Although Linode’s services aren’t exclusively based on open source, the company is an integral part of open source culture. Since its founding in 2003, it’s carved out a solid reputation as a straight shooting cloud infrastructure company with a commitment to supporting open projects.
This includes being regularly active at open source conferences — both as a sponsor and as a participant — as well as providing free hosting for key community resources such as LWN.net. Add to that the public guides and tutorials it maintains for everything from Linux basics to advanced container orchestration, and it becomes easy to see why Linode is seen as a reliable pillar in the open ecosystem.
Its support for open source has only grown since it was acquired by Akamai in 2022. Its new parent has expanded its footprint in cloud and edge computing, while publicly reaffirming its own commitment to open source principles. The company sponsors major open source initiatives, collaborates with industry groups to promote security and interoperability, and continues to devote resources toward tools and platforms used by millions of developers worldwide.
Major outages like the one this week are rare for Linode, which is known for robust network design. The ripple effects of this outage serve as a reminder not only of how many open source communities and services rely on Linode, but also of the essential role that trusted infrastructure providers play in making the collaboratively developed world of open source possible.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
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