UPS cable fault causes data centre outage in London Docklands

What happened

A power interruption lasting 222 milliseconds was reported at the Global Switch data centre in the London Docklands. It was traced to a fault in a high-voltage cable end box on a circuit breaker of one diesel rotary UPS unit. All customers of one managed hosting provider lost access to services hosted there. Staff waited several hours before restarting hardware. By about 5 pm that day, about 85 percent of that provider's services had been restored, and at least one customer took two days to recover fully.

Damaged parts were replaced and cable terminations on the remaining units were checked. The article date and the 10 September date in the text do not agree, so the year is not clear from this source.

Contributing factors

The report attributes the interruption to a fault in the high-voltage cable end box of a circuit breaker on a diesel rotary UPS unit. Why that box failed is not stated.

Lessons learned

1. A power interruption of a fraction of a second can still force a long recovery for hosted services.
2. After a high-voltage cable fault, confirm that power is stable before restarting customer equipment.
3. Check cable terminations on the remaining UPS units before normal operation resumes.

Source

datacenterknowledge.com