Power outage hits Interxion data centre in London

What happened

On 10 January 2022, Interxion reported a critical power interruption at its Hanbury Street facility (LON1) in east London. The company said the interruption affected some mains control equipment and caused outages across services at the site, and that a full investigation into the root cause was under way. Contemporary reporting said the outage appeared to affect the first floor and that switchgear may not have transferred supply to on-site generators despite redundant feeds.

Interxion said services began returning from 1945 and the facility was back to operational status at 2230. Electronic trading at the London Metal Exchange was unavailable for about five hours overnight, while phone trading continued. Cloud provider Vultr and other customers also reported loss of service.

Contributing factors

The operator said the interruption affected some mains control equipment. Separate reporting suggested that redundant power feeds and transfer to backup generators may also have failed. The root cause had not been published when the report appeared.

Lessons learned

1. Test switchgear and transfer systems so a loss of mains supply does not also block backup generation.
2. Keep customer communication channels that still work if site power and support systems fail.
3. Give affected customers timely updates, including what is not yet known about restoration.

Source

datacenterdynamics.com