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UPDATED "Disastrous data loss" takes Podfather Reilly off the air

cameron-reillyAustralia’s best known producer of podcasts has been offline for the last 48 hours or so after suffering a drastic technical failure.

The Podcast Network, founded by “podfather” Cameron Reilly, has been down since Saturday. Users going to its various properties see a message saying “There is no web site at this address”.

Meanwhile, a message has appeared at the Podcast Network Blog saying: “On Saturday Dec 20, the hard drive on TPN’s server suddenly died. We are in the process of restoring and re-building all of our sites and will have all of the shows back online asap.”

The Podcast Network produces 95 shows and claims an international audience of around half a million listeners a month. Among the best known podcasts is G’Day World, presented by Reilly, which was Australia’s first podcast.

Update: The data loss for The Podcast Network may be disastrous, it is being reported this afternoon. According to website The Inquisitr, Reilly has emailed TPN podcasters to say that the data on the server in Texas is irrecoverable and the entire archive of podcasts is gone. Writing on the Inquisitr, commentator Duncan Riley said:

“TPN has had a difficult year, with the network being hacked earlier this year due to an old version of WordPress being run, causing widespread outages and some discontent among its podcasters. A number of podcasters left the network after the earlier issues. From the outside though I’d think a loss of data along these lines would be a serious issue for any company. That they were not backed up externally, or that they were archived on a single hard drive to begin with may suggest that the company may have already fallen on hard times after having claimed at one stage to be delivering 800,000 podcasts a month (total downloads) on 8 million page views across the network.”

Second update However, in our comments section, Cameron Reilly has added: “Things aren’t as bad as it seems.”

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