My VPS (Frankfurt / DE region, Ubuntu 26.04) has been completely frozen and unreachable for several hours. It was running fine, then went unresponsive exactly when the daily automatic backup started (~21:47 UTC).
Symptoms:
VPS is offline (no SSH, no ping).
KVM/console is frozen — I can't type anything.
In the panel, Reboot and Stop are both blocked with: "Action not available while VPS is backuping."
Console last showed: "Failed to start systemd-journald.service".
It looks like the automatic backup is stuck and froze the VM. I opened a ticket but was told the technical team only responds during business hours.
Has anyone experienced a stuck VPS backup like this? Is there any way to exit the "backuping" state (release the backup / force a restart) without waiting for support? Thanks.
I've never encountered this kind of situation on a VPS, but if it's the host that has a problem, proximity will step in at the data center (if the problem is actually detected). Otherwise you'll have to wait for the ticket to be handled
I haven't encountered this kind of situation before either. I haven't been able to do anything with my VPS for hours. I've also opened a support ticket and I am just continuing to wait right now.
Quite a common problem actually, I’ve seen this in public cloud (it was a long time ago).
Typically, a problem with the host, or the server that hosts the backups.
Spotty saturation, etc etc...
Problem worsened by the fact that OVH probably saturates the hosts to the maximum to make them as profitable as possible (the rise in hardware costs doesn’t help).
VPS remain low‑cost/mass‑market products, so we can say that these problems, which shouldn’t happen, are inevitably linked to the chosen business model (and that the consumer validates it by buying).
This remains rare, and unless it repeats, I wouldn’t consider it a problem per se.
Note, it’s up to the admins to unblock the situation, you can’t do anything at your level, and it’s all the more frustrating when support doesn’t respond or reacts slowly… Because on the admin side, they can resolve the situation quite quickly (when the problem is reported to them properly)…
And I add that I haven’t had this kind of problem since long ago, so I stick to the idea of a one‑off issue that was poorly detected/escalated to the admins.
As Gaston says, Twitter support works miracles… I closed my account there, but they are very responsive and attentive, you shouldn’t hesitate to leave them a little note…
