Reported backup power fire disrupts Zenith Bank data centre

What happened

On 3 May 2023, TechCabal reported that Zenith Bank, described as Nigeria’s biggest bank by market capitalisation, was suffering a total infrastructure downtime after a fire incident linked to its primary data centre. Sources told the outlet that the downtime began around 7 a.m. after a backup power system caught fire and cut power to the data centre. At the time of the report the bank had not confirmed the incident: a communications contact said they could neither confirm nor deny it, and customers had not been told on social media.

Sources said the bank was trying to move to disaster recovery infrastructure, and that the switch was delayed because not all services were running active-active and had to be switched manually. One source said the bank expected services to be back before the end of the day. Whether that happened was not reported.

Contributing factors

Sources cited in the report said not all banking services were in an active-active deployment, so recovery had to be switched manually. The report does not say why the backup power system caught fire.

Lessons learned

1. Arrange critical services so that loss of the primary site does not depend on a slow manual switch.
2. Test disaster recovery under realistic failure conditions, including loss of power at the primary site.
3. Treat backup power plant as a fire risk that needs detection, isolation and a practised response.

Source

techcabal.com