[dcope]

I got bit by this over this weekend, too. I received the initial email September 27 @ 1:35 AM local time. I called Rackspace to see if they would be sending out emails prior to each VPS being rebooted 30 minutes or so before just as a heads up for human monitoring purposes. The representative told me that it "was not feasible" for them to do that for every VPS. Instead... I've been camped by my computer all of today (Sunday) to monitor the reboots since I have servers at DFW & ORD and they have a 24 hour time window for those regions.

While their status page was somewhat helpful, I find it absolutely absurd that they can only update it once every 60 minutes to cue customers in. In addition, their Cloud Control Panel doesn't reflect the reboots. When a VPS goes down for a reboot... the CP shows the server as "Active - Online and functioning as properly". Thankfully great third party monitoring services (using Scout) exist so they can notify in-place of Rackspace's incompetency.

As someone who shells out a significant amount of money to them each month, this is pretty disheartening. That being said... I seem to have survived the Great Rackspace Reboot of 2014 and can only hope they handle the next event better.

[lotsofcows]

We've been given a 6 hour maintenance window. They won't give us a smaller window or tell us when it's finished. Apparently, we should apply our own monitoring - fortunately, my tech chaps are psychic and can tell if monitoring is down because Rackspace maintenance is taking place or because it's taken place and something's broken.