(Anyone writing in to support got an immediate response on this, but we were waiting for a complete explanation before posting.)
For a period of one hour on Friday, October 10th at 7:30 AM, Squarespace sites were unavailable due to a UPS power outage at Peer1 in New York City, which is our network provider. While Squarespace itself implements proper power planning to ensure that most of our core systems are spread between two power sources, the outage affected Peer1’s core networking equipment which routes data to their entire New York datacenter. When the UPS failed, taking the routing equipment with it, all websites at the datacenter (including Squarespace) were taken offline. The outage lasted one hour.
Upon restoration of power and bringing their network equipment online at 8:30 AM — Squarespace immediately began serving traffic again and all was returned to normal. Squarepsace was alerted to the situation by our external monitors within 60 seconds of the incident, and we were on site while Peer1 restored their equipment.
If anyone has any questions about planning, backup, or redundancy — please write in to support to have them answered. We take this sort of thing extremely seriously, and attempt to provide total transparency regarding the systems you’re hosted on and how things here operate.