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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.

Dear [redacted],

It has been a long day and hard day here at Rackspace. We know it's been a long day for you. We are deeply sorry for the events that have taken place at our Dallas/Fort Worth data center. Your satisfaction is what every Racker works towards every day, especially today.

To those affected by the outage, I apologize. We all apologize. We understand the frustration and uncertainty you have gone through. We take full responsibility for what happened and we will work with you to reach a remedy that satisfies you.

We have made the latest status update to the myrackspace.com customer portal. Please continue to visit it regularly for our most recent updates.

As always, your Account Manager and Support Team are available to help in any way. Likewise, please feel free to contact me if you have any questions or needs.

Sincerely,

Lanham Napier
CEO
Rackspace