Every data centre incident in public reporting that names switchgear, a breaker, a busbar or the electrical room: fires, arc flashes and the outages that followed, each with its sources. Free to read.
26 entries so far, 7 since 2024. Confirm your email and every data centre incident on the register arrives as a spreadsheet (CSV), free. One email when a new incident is reported, at most two a day, plus a Monday digest. Free, no account needed, unsubscribe in one click.
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Newest incident first. Search them, or narrow them by country, year or severity. Each entry is free to read, with what happened and its sources; the record behind it adds the cause where it is established, the part that failed, the downtime and the loss.
On 7 July 2025 a fire broke out in an equipment room at the Ramses switchboard of Telecom Egypt, on the seventh floor of a 10-storey building in the Ramses area of Cairo. The fire lasted for hours. Four workers died and 26 people were injured. The cause has...
At about 3:26 a.m. on 7 April 2025, a power outage hit the Bundang internet data centre (IDC) operated by Hostway, disrupting services on the third and fourth floors. According to a failure report obtained by Digital Daily, overcurrent in some generator units...
In late March 2025 a small smouldering fire broke out in the electrical system that mainly supplied the second expansion stage of the Lichtenberg II high-performance computer (LB2A2) at the TU Darmstadt data centre in Darmstadt, Germany. The university...
The record behind each entry: the manufacturer, integrator and operator, root cause, failure mode, downtime, losses and every source.
On 9 October 2024, MainOne suffered a one-hour power outage at MDXi II data centre in Lekki, Nigeria, owned by Equinix, TechCabal reported. The outage took several Nigerian banks offline. The report said millions of customers could not access banking...
On 12 August 2024, GleSYS AB was carrying out planned maintenance at its VBDC data centre in Stockholm, Sweden. The work involved installing one of two new uninterruptible power supply (UPS) units with new switchgear, and retiring the previous UPS system....
On 14 May 2024 a transformer supplying power to the Interxion/Digital Realty FRA2 data centre in Frankfurt failed, causing loss of critical IT load to equipment in the space. The site's generators also failed to start. Around 11:56 UTC a generator was running...
On 26 March 2024 at 14:58 UTC, the PDX01 data centre in Portland, Oregon, lost all power, less than five months after an earlier outage at the same facility. Cloudflare says the loss followed a reportedly simultaneous failure of four Flexential-owned and...
On 2 November 2023 Portland General Electric (PGE) had an unplanned maintenance event that shut down one of the utility feeds into the Flexential PDX04 data centre near Hillsboro, Oregon. Flexential started its generators to supplement the lost feed and kept...
In the early hours of 3 May 2023, a fire broke out in Lagos, Nigeria, at a Zenith Bank site. The Lagos State Fire Rescue Service said the fire was at one of the bank's branches on Ajose Adeogun and started in a ground floor room housing inverter panels and...
On 14 February 2023 smoke was reported at a data centre in Boston, United States, used by Oracle NetSuite. According to a report in The Register, cited by Network World, the smoke came from electrical equipment in a power room at the site. The same report...
On Monday 10 January 2022, at about 1810 UTC, a critical power interruption struck Interxion's Hanbury Street facility, known as LON1, in East London. According to the operator, the interruption affected some of the mains control equipment and caused outages...
In the early hours of 30 January 2022, Equinix security systems detected smoke from a power room at the company's MD2 data centre in Alcobendas, Madrid. The Madrid emergency service sent seven fire crews to a small fire in a basement area where transformers...
On 27 August 2020, a fire broke out in a supply room on the third floor of the Telstra London Hosting Centre at 6 Greenwich View Place, on the Isle of Dogs, London. London Fire Brigade sent four fire engines and around 25 firefighters and reported that only a...
On Wednesday 4 April 2018, shortly after 1pm, a fire started in the electrical room of Georgetown University's Laurel Data Center in Maryland, United States. The facility is the university's primary data centre and is located off campus. According to the...
On 9 November 2017 at about 07:04, a fault on the external electricity network cut both 20kV supply cables to the OVH Strasbourg (SBG) site in France. The two cables shared a single circuit breaker, so both feeds were lost. The site's high-voltage backup...
Beginning at 22:19 UTC on 15 March 2017, a main breaker tripped in one of the redundant upstream remote power panels serving a storage scale unit in Microsoft Azure's East US region. As load transferred to the remaining power sources, the transfer caused a...
On 10 September 2016, a high voltage fault in the cable end box of the output circuit breaker for one on-site diesel rotary uninterruptible power supply at the Global Switch 2 data centre in London interrupted power for 222 milliseconds. All customers lost...
On Monday 8 August 2016, an electrical component failed at Delta Air Lines' Atlanta headquarters, Georgia, and the transformer supplying power to the airline's data centre shut down. The data centre moved to backup power, but not all servers were connected to...
On 21 July 2016, a power failure at Telehouse North, a data centre in London's Docklands, disrupted internet services for BT and Plusnet customers across the UK. BT said the problem was a substantial power failure at one of its internet connection partners in...
On 4 June 2016 at 10:25 PM PDT (5 June Sydney time), a utility provider suffered a loss of power at a regional substation during severe weather, cutting utility power to multiple Amazon Web Services facilities in the Sydney Region. The event was an unusually...
Counted from the register on 27 October 2026. The 26 entries whose own reporting names this, of 179 data centre entries in all. A mention in the reporting, not a finding of fault.
As the register classes each entry, from its sources.
| What happened | Entries | |
|---|---|---|
| Electrical | 20 | |
| Thermal / fire | 5 | |
| Control system | 1 |
Counted from the words of each entry's own reporting: an entry counts under each part it names, and "Not stated" means the public reporting named none. A mention, not a finding of fault.
| Part named | Entries | |
|---|---|---|
| Switchgear and electrical rooms | 26 | |
| Backup generators | 13 | |
| UPS and battery rooms | 9 | |
| Transformers and substations | 6 |
| Country | Entries | |
|---|---|---|
| United States | 10 | |
| United Kingdom | 5 | |
| Germany | 2 | |
| Nigeria | 2 | |
| France | 2 | |
| Egypt | 1 | |
| South Korea | 1 | |
| Sweden | 1 | |
| Spain | 1 | |
| Australia | 1 |
Type up to eight company names (operators, owners, manufacturers, contractors) and your email address. The brief comes back by email: every published data centre switchgear entry that names them, with its sources, and a plain line where a name has no entries. Free, once, no account.
The register holds 26 data centre switchgear entries from public reporting, 2010 to 2025, in 10 countries. 5 of them are fires or thermal events; the rest are electrical, control system and other incidents. Each entry lists its sources.
Where the public reporting names a part, the most common are switchgear and electrical rooms (26), backup generators (13), UPS and battery rooms (9). 0 of the 26 entries name no part. The register does not guess a cause; where a fire service, regulator or the operator states one, the entry carries it and says who said it.
In the reporting the register has found, United States (10), United Kingdom (5), Germany (2) have the most entries. 5 are in the United Kingdom. That partly reflects where the assets are built and where the press reports on them.
Yes. Sign up on this page for data centre switchgear incidents: one email when a new incident is reported, at most two a day, plus a Monday digest. Free, no account, and every data centre incident on the register arrives as a spreadsheet when you confirm.
Public reporting on data centre switchgear incidents often names the site but rarely the make, the model or the cause. The register does not guess them. Where a fire service, regulator or the operator states one, the entry carries it and says who said it.
26 entries so far, 7 since 2024. Confirm your email and every data centre incident on the register arrives as a spreadsheet (CSV), free. One email when a new incident is reported, at most two a day, plus a Monday digest. Free, no account needed, unsubscribe in one click.
We will also email you about the register's paid records and plans, at most once a week and three times in all. You can stop these at any time. By subscribing you agree to the privacy policy.