A cooling failure at RadiusDC’s Phoenix data centre knocked hosting, email and management services offline on 13 August 2026. Namecheap and Spaceship both said their outages were caused by the same incident.
Ech’s short answer
Both companies said the storm disabled the data centre’s cooling systems and sent temperatures to unsafe levels. RadiusDC told affected customers to shut systems down until the site was safe to operate again.
Namecheap and Spaceship sent customers almost identical restoration emails once services were back. Both named RadiusDC: Phoenix as the affected data centre and said a major storm had disabled cooling, forcing systems offline until temperatures were safe.
The outage was not limited to websites. Hosting, email and management tools were affected. Namecheap said existing DNS records and URL redirects kept working, although customers could not change them while the management systems were offline.
A few of my own websites were caught up in the outage, so I saw the impact first-hand. The domains were still registered, but the sites behind them were unreachable while the affected hosting systems were offline.
Other providers also have infrastructure in the Phoenix facility, but that does not mean they all went down on 13 August. I have only counted Namecheap and Spaceship as confirmed here because both companies directly tied their outages to RadiusDC Phoenix.
This was a data-centre failure, not a failure of the domain-name system itself.
Namecheap and Spaceship said a major storm knocked out cooling at the RadiusDC Phoenix data centre. As temperatures climbed, RadiusDC told affected customers to take systems offline rather than risk damaging the hardware.
The systems stayed offline until the data centre was safe to use again. Namecheap and Spaceship then restored services and told customers they were continuing to monitor them.
The Phoenix site was previously operated by phoenixNAP. RadiusDC announced in March 2026 that it was acquiring phoenixNAP’s Phoenix data-centre and colocation business, with phoenixNAP remaining as a tenant for services it continued to operate. RadiusDC lists the facility at 3402 E University Drive, Phoenix, Arizona.
Namecheap and Spaceship both sent customers notices naming RadiusDC: Phoenix and describing the same cooling failure.
Hosting, EasyWP, Private Email and free email forwarding were disrupted. DNS management and URL-redirect management were unavailable, although existing DNS records and existing redirects continued to work.
Hosting, EasyWP, Spacemail and email forwarding were disrupted. Spaceship directly attributed the outage to the RadiusDC Phoenix cooling-system failure.
Other names have been linked with the Phoenix facility or mentioned in outage discussions, including hosting.com, Liquid Web/Nexcess, MX Guarddog, 1GServers and NameSilo. Being in the same facility, or having a separate Phoenix outage, does not prove that a company went down because of this cooling failure. I have not listed those companies as confirmed without a statement from the company tying its outage to the 13 August RadiusDC incident.
A domain name, DNS, web hosting and email are separate parts of the setup, so they did not all fail together.
Namecheap said existing DNS records continued to resolve even though DNS management was unavailable. Existing URL redirects also kept working. Customers could not make changes, but the records and redirects already in place continued to operate.
Hosting was different. A domain could still point to the right server while that server was offline. The same applied to email: DNS records could remain in place even though the mail service itself was unavailable.
The outage did not cancel domain registrations or remove ownership of registered names.
Namecheap said existing DNS records continued to resolve during the incident.
Namecheap customers could not manage DNS records while the affected management service was offline.
Websites on affected hosting infrastructure could be unreachable even when their domains still resolved.
Namecheap Private Email, Spaceship Spacemail and forwarding services were among the affected products.
Namecheap said existing redirects kept working even though redirect management was unavailable.
Both companies told customers that incoming messages should not have been lost. Mail servers normally retry delivery when the receiving service is unavailable, so affected messages were expected to arrive later.
After having a few of my own sites go down, I would make sure one hosting failure could not take all of my important services with it.
Namecheap and Spaceship are closely connected businesses, so it is not surprising that some infrastructure is shared. What matters to me as a website owner is knowing whether my hosting, email, DNS and backups all depend on the same building or provider.
Namecheap and Spaceship said they plan to add more redundancy across data centres in the US, Europe and Asia. On my side, I would focus first on backups and on separating the services that would be hardest to replace during an outage.
Full multi-region failover costs more and takes more work. For most small sites, I would start by keeping tested backups away from the host, checking where DNS and email are provided, and making sure the host does not also hold the only copy of the site you would need to rebuild.
RadiusDC announced its acquisition of phoenixNAP’s Phoenix data-centre and colocation business in March 2026. The agreement said phoenixNAP would remain a tenant for services it continued to own and operate. In their notices about the 13 August outage, Namecheap and Spaceship both named RadiusDC: Phoenix.
In brief
Namecheap and Spaceship both tied their outages to the same cooling failure, and a few of my own websites went down with them. Namecheap’s existing DNS records kept resolving, but hosting and email were still affected. After seeing my own sites go down, I would not keep the only usable backups with the same host, and I would avoid putting every important service behind the same point of failure.
