UK hosting provider Fasthosts suffered extended downtime on Monday night, which has been attributed to an electrical problem. Fasthosts, which was bought last year by 1&1 Internet, hosts more than 605,000 web sites, making it one of the UK’s top three web hosting operations. Fasthosts told customers that the outage resulted from a problem in the electrical equipment that distributes power to servers. While there was no fire, a fire alarm was triggered, which in some scenarios can prompt staff to cut power to parts of the data center for safety reasons.

Last night’s downtime can be seen on this performance chart:

A dynamically updating chart of the Fasthosts.co.uk web site performance is available. Netcraft offers a web site performance monitoring service that provides similar charts, along with e-mail alerts when an outage occurs.