A Review of European Hosting Uptime Failures and Service Disruptions in 2024

Here at RobotAlp, we're deeply involved with server security and ensuring your website enjoys uninterrupted uptime. Because of this, we constantly keep an eye on low uptime rates from hosting services, periods of service unavailability, and the reasons behind server outages. We've put together a series of articles for you, using 2024 data as a basis, to illustrate that no server service is 100% infallible and that even the largest companies can experience numerous disruptions. As you might have seen in our previous article covering low uptime rates and outages in America for 2023-2024, these problems can occur even on the servers of the world's leading companies. Therefore, if the hosting service you're currently using has been running smoothly for the past two years and this sense of security has led to any complacency regarding precautions, our humble advice would be to develop an action plan before you encounter similar issues.

In today's hyper-connected world, your website is often the face of your business, your primary sales channel, or your main communication hub. Its constant availability – what we in the tech world call "uptime" – isn't just a technical metric; it's the lifeline of your online presence. When your website goes down, you're not just offline; you're potentially losing customers, damaging your reputation, and missing out on critical opportunities.

At RobotAlp, we understand the paramount importance of uninterrupted service. That's why we offer robust tools like our comprehensive Uptime Monitoring services, because being aware of potential issues is the first step to mitigating them. This report, based on collated research from 2024, dives deep into the documented outages and performance issues experienced by various European hosting and server companies, offering a candid look at the challenges faced.

The European hosting landscape, while generally stable, witnessed several noteworthy incidents in 2024 that affected service availability for numerous customers. These events, stemming from diverse causes like DDoS attacks, hardware failures, problematic infrastructure upgrades, and software glitches , underscore the inherent complexities and risks in maintaining flawless digital services.

• OVHcloud (France): A European Giant Faces Network Woes One of Europe's largest cloud and hosting providers, OVHcloud, experienced a highly visible global backbone network outage on October 30, 2024. This incident, lasting approximately 17 minutes, rendered a vast majority of their services inaccessible globally, with traffic from OVH's network to major platforms like Cloudflare plummeting by as much as 95% during the event. While the company stated its annual SLA targets were still met due to the brevity of the global impact , the immediate disruption for customers was substantial. Earlier in the year, on June 5, 2024, a general failure at their Gravelines data center in France also caused significant performance degradation and accessibility issues for many web hosting clusters for several hours. While no catastrophic data loss was reported from these 2024 incidents , they highlighted the vulnerabilities in even large-scale infrastructures. User complaints during the year also touched upon support delays and network performance concerns.
• IONOS (1&1 - Germany): Email and Network Disruptions Plague Users IONOS, a major integrated hosting and telecommunications company, faced significant operational challenges, particularly with its email services. A critical email system outage occurred on August 29, 2024, attributed to a faulty software update. For 1-2 hours, many customers were unable to access their mailboxes, send, or receive emails, a severe disruption for business communication. This event significantly impacted the monthly uptime for the affected email service, pushing it to an estimated low of ~99% for that period. Just days earlier, on August 21, 2024, a widespread network issue affected IONOS's (1&1) broadband internet customers in Germany for approximately an hour, also potentially impacting some hosting services reliant on that connectivity. Beyond these major events, user reports throughout 2024 also cited isolated incidents of email data loss and frustrations with customer service.
• Scaleway (France): Cloud Services Hit by Instability Scaleway, Iliad group's cloud arm, encountered two major service incidents in its Paris (FR-PAR) region. On September 1, 2024, a significant Kubernetes ("Kapsule" service) outage left a customer's cluster completely inaccessible for approximately 4 hours, a critical downtime for applications reliant on it. Perhaps more impactful was the prolonged Object Storage instability experienced between September 24 and October 23, 2024. This issue, stemming from architectural upgrades with insufficient RAM allocated to new load balancers , led to high error rates (503s), increased latency, and severe performance degradation for S3 uploads for about a week, with full normalization taking a month. While Scaleway reported that data integrity was maintained and the SLA for Object Storage for September was ~99.93% , the period was fraught with difficulties for affected users. A separate VPC network event on September 1, 2024, also caused general network instability, DNS, and DHCP failures in the fr-par-1 and fr-par-2 availability zones for over 4 hours due to overloaded route-reflectors.
• DomainFactory (Germany - A GoDaddy Company): Critical Email Failure and Data Loss A significant and severe incident struck DomainFactory around October 18, 2024, when multiple disks (reportedly three) on one of its mail clusters (mailcluster3) failed simultaneously. This catastrophic hardware failure resulted in the affected email services being completely inaccessible for approximately three full days. For these customers, the monthly uptime for their email service plummeted to an estimated ~95%. More critically, the incident led to confirmed data loss; emails delivered to the affected mailboxes between 00:00 and 09:40 MESZ on October 18, 2024, were potentially lost and unrecoverable, even after restoration from backups. The company had to report this data loss to relevant German authorities. This event caused considerable distress and criticism from users, particularly resellers, regarding the simultaneous failure and the data recovery process.
• ZAP-Hosting (Germany): Irrecoverable Data Loss from RAID Failure Primarily known for game server and VPS hosting, ZAP-Hosting experienced a devastating hardware failure on June 28, 2024. A physical host server in their German location suffered an "irreparable RAID failure." This catastrophic event resulted in the total and permanent loss of all data for all VPS instances hosted on that specific machine. For affected customers, uptime was effectively 0%, and their data was gone. ZAP-Hosting informed customers, suggesting they use their own backups (if any) and offered a €15 credit as compensation, a response that drew criticism for being inadequate given the severity of the data loss.
• Contabo (Germany): A Mixed Bag of Infrastructure Challenges and User-Reported Issues Contabo documented several operational incidents in 2024. Their Nuremberg Data Center faced a significant cooling system disruption in September due to summer heat, and a brief power grid failure in October (which was handled quickly with lessons learned from the September event). More prolonged was a server accessibility issue affecting their Düsseldorf and Hub Europe data centers from November 17-21, 2024, lasting approximately 3 days. Towards the end of the year, a technical issue related to ZRAM memory compression interacting poorly with swap space under full load caused intermittent server freezes requiring reboots; this was resolved by disabling ZRAM. Beyond these officially acknowledged events, user reports on platforms like Reddit alleged more severe issues, including VPS instances being deleted without warning and subsequent data loss in November 2024, coupled with unresponsive support. While some users reported long-term stability , these allegations are serious. Contabo's official policy clearly states they do not store customer data for unmanaged services and are unable to recover lost data, emphasizing customer responsibility for backups.
• Hetzner Online (Germany): Generally Stable but Not Without Incidents Hetzner largely maintained its reputation for reliability in 2024, with no major widespread outages directly attributed to its core infrastructure. However, it wasn't entirely incident-free. In September 2024, a significant DoS attack (1 million packets/sec) targeted a customer hosted on Hetzner (Onetime Secret), causing over 12 hours of downtime for that specific customer, with Hetzner's network team involved in mitigation. Additionally, users and third-party status trackers reported issues with Hetzner's Cloud API and Console access around November/December 2024, with some discrepancies between user-observed downtime and official acknowledgements from Hetzner. Other minor issues reported on their status page included "hetzner.com error reports" and emergency power system maintenance. Hetzner's policy clearly states that customers are responsible for the management and security of their unmanaged dedicated/cloud servers, including data backups.
• Hostinger (Lithuania): User Allegations Cloud High Uptime Claims While Hostinger publicly promotes high uptime (e.g., 100% for its Website Builder for a period in 2024 ) and has received industry accolades , a significant user allegation surfaced on Hacker News in 2024. A user claimed their account was suspended for alleged phishing without proof, and Hostinger subsequently denied access to all data and backups, resulting in a purported financial loss exceeding $200,000 for the user. Hostinger's reported response cited security protocols and shared responsibility. This incident highlights a critical disconnect that can occur between advertised SLAs and the handling of severe, individual customer issues, especially concerning data access and loss under alleged policy violations. Other reported issues on status trackers for Hostinger in 2024/2025 mainly pointed to emergency maintenance or performance degradation in specific data centers, often in the US.

European Hosting Providers - 2024 Uptime & Incident Snapshot (Focus on Disruptions)

The experiences of various European hosting providers in 2024 serve as a crucial reminder: no service is immune to disruptions, and the impact of these events can range from temporary inconvenience to severe data loss and significant financial repercussions for website owners. While providers often aim for high availability, the complexities of modern infrastructure, the ever-present threat of cyber-attacks, and the potential for hardware or software failures mean that outages will inevitably occur.

For website owners, this underscores the critical need for independent oversight. Relying solely on a provider's status page or uptime guarantees is insufficient. Implementing your own proactive monitoring, like the services offered by RobotAlp, provides an unbiased, external perspective on your website's accessibility and performance. This allows you to be the first to know of any issues, verify the extent of an outage, and make informed decisions to protect your online presence and business continuity. Coupled with a robust, independent backup strategy, continuous monitoring is your best defense against the unpredictable nature of the digital landscape.