Site outage 12–14 May: what happened and our apology
The CM Beyer website was unavailable from approximately 09:40 on Tuesday 12 May until 13:15 today, Thursday 14 May. For around 51 hours, anyone visiting cmbeyer.co.uk saw an error page rather than our site. The same outage affected cmbeyer.com.au and the contact forms on both sites.
We’re sorry. It shouldn’t have happened, and it shouldn’t have taken as long to resolve as it did. This article is a straightforward account of what went wrong and what we’re doing about it.
What happened
The outage originated at IONOS, our hosting provider. Following what we understand was a routine review of the customer account our sites sit on, the underlying server was blocked. To visitors, our domains stopped resolving correctly. To us, the sites looked offline.
The fault was entirely at the hosting layer. Our WordPress installation, content, databases, and email were all intact throughout. No data was lost or exposed. The issue was purely about whether visitors could reach the site.
Why it took so long
This is the part we’re most uncomfortable about. Once we identified the cause as a hosting-layer issue, resolution depended on IONOS support. Our initial ticket was raised within an hour of the outage starting. The first substantive engineering response came roughly 14 hours later, and the eventual fix was applied on Thursday morning after a further round of escalation.
We could have communicated more clearly during the outage. We posted updates on our LinkedIn page and emailed active clients directly, but we didn’t have an independent status page where anyone affected could check progress. That’s the most obvious gap in how we handled this, and it’s the first thing we’re fixing.
What this affected
The website itself was unreachable. The contact forms on both UK and Australian sites were down, so any new enquiries during this window weren’t received. Email continued to work throughout — our email infrastructure is separate from the website hosting — so clients with our direct addresses could still reach us. Live client engagements were not affected operationally; the work happens in document tools and video calls, not on the website.
If you tried to contact us via the website between Wednesday morning and Friday lunchtime and didn’t hear back, that’s why. Please resubmit and we’ll respond promptly.
What we’re doing about it
Four things, in order of priority.
First, we’re putting up a separate status page on independent infrastructure, so that during any future outage there’s a place to check what’s going on. We expect to have this live within two weeks.
Second, we’re reviewing our hosting arrangement. We’re not making a decision in anger — moving hosting providers is a non-trivial piece of work and we want to assess properly rather than react. The review will be complete within the month.
Third, we’re implementing independent monitoring so that we know about outages within minutes rather than discovering them ourselves. This was a gap that allowed the issue to run for longer than necessary at the start.
Fourth, we’re adding an automatic email alert to all active client contacts in the event of an outage so that anyone working with us hears from us first.
What this means about working with us
It’s a fair question. Clients trust us with strategic work, sensitive data, and significant budget. If we can’t keep our own website up for three days, what does that say about us?
The honest answer: it says we depend on a third-party hosting provider, and that dependency had a failure mode we hadn’t planned for properly. The work we do for clients doesn’t depend on our website being up — engagements run in our document and project tools — but the symbolism isn’t great. We accept that.
What we’d ask is to be judged by how we respond. We’ve been transparent about what happened, we’ve named the cause, and we’re making specific changes to prevent recurrence and to communicate better next time. That’s what we’d expect from any supplier of ours, and it’s what we want to be held to.
If you’d like to discuss this directly, please reach out. We’re happy to walk through what happened in more detail with any client who wants reassurance.
Frequently Asked Questions
Was any client data exposed?
No. The outage was a network/configuration issue at the hosting provider. No data was accessed, modified, or lost. Client data is stored in separate systems and was not involved.
Did anything reach you while the site was down?
Contact form submissions during the outage window were not received. Email continued to function normally. If you tried to reach us via the form, please resubmit.
Are you moving away from IONOS?
We’re reviewing the arrangement. We’ll announce a decision once the review is complete. We won’t make a change just for the sake of being seen to react.
How will I know if this happens again?
Once our status page is live, you’ll be able to check it any time. Active client contacts will also receive an automatic email alert.
Should this affect a decision to work with you?
That’s a call for clients to make based on the full picture, not a single incident. We’d rather be judged on how we handle problems than on the absence of them.
