What happens when an ESP data center goes down?

Data center failures happen. Well-architected ESPs handle them gracefully through redundancy and failover systems.

Immediate response:

Monitoring detects the outage (automated health checks, alerts)

Load balancers stop routing new traffic to the failed location

Incoming messages redirect to healthy data centers

Message preservation:

Queued messages in the failed location remain on persistent storage

Once connectivity restores, queued messages resume processing

Redundant queue systems may have copies in other locations

Continued operation:

Other data centers absorb the additional load

Sending continues, possibly with increased latency or reduced throughput

New messages process normally from healthy locations

Recovery:

Engineers diagnose and repair the issue

Once verified healthy, the data center rejoins the network

Traffic gradually rebalances to normal distribution

Any stuck queues drain

Customer impact:

Well-prepared ESPs: minimal to no visible impact; slightly increased latency possible

Poorly prepared ESPs: sending delays, potential message loss, dashboard outages

Multi-region redundancy separates good infrastructure from risky setups. Ask your ESP about their disaster recovery capabilities.