Fire at Port Melbourne data centre disrupts UniSuper services

What happened

A fire at an unspecified data centre in Port Melbourne was reported to have triggered a partial system shutdown affecting UniSuper. The company said the direct impact on members was limited to an outage of its telephony system and MemberOnline portal. UniSuper provides superannuation services to more than 400,000 people; how many of them could not use those services was not reported. No data was reported lost or compromised. The company said services were back online the following day. It declined to name the data centre provider, and the cause of the fire was not reported.

Contributing factors

The company said it was still waiting to hear what had happened in the facility. No cause was reported.

Lessons learned

1. A fire at a hosted data centre can take customer telephony and online portals offline even when stored data is not lost.
2. Other operators can only judge their own exposure if the facility and the systems affected are identified.
3. Restoring service is not the same as understanding the fire, where the cause has not yet been reported.

Source

datacenterdynamics.com