July 14, 2008 – (HOSTSEARCH.COM) – A break in at Cable & Wireless in Watford, UK has interrupted access to Sainsbury's groceries website, and the website of leading UK business newspaper, the Financial Times (FT), a number of sources reported recently.
Cable & Wireless, “one of the world's leading international communications organizations”, was hosting both the online ordering service provided by Sainsbury's, a leading UK chain of supermarkets, and FT’s main site. Metal thieves looking for copper wire are suspected of shutting down Cable & Wireless’ website servers.
"As a result of a technical problem that, Cable & Wireless, our Internet provider experienced, customers were unable to gain access to our groceries website on Thursday until early afternoon,” explained a Sainsbury's spokeswoman. Despite the incident, the company’s grocery delivery services were not affected, although the FT was unable to add new articles or update its site, and had to resort to a US-based backup.
"Cable and Wireless have experienced unforeseen network issues that have regrettably had an effect on a number of our customers, but service at our facilities is now back up and running,” said a C&W spokeswoman.
This is the latest in a number of incidents where thieves managed to bring down websites. Earlier this year the server hosting the website of veteran pop musician Peter Gabriel was stolen from his host, Rednet Ltd., putting his site offline, while in late 2007, the night manager of Chicago-based web host CI Host was attacked with a Taser by thieves who stole around 20 servers, including some belonging to its customers.
