Brief power outage hits tenth floor of London data centre

What happened

The tenth floor of Global Switch’s GS2 data centre in London suffered a brief power outage on 10 July 2017 that temporarily affected services for customers of EX Networks. Power returned after a short period, network services came back online, and EX Networks said customer PDUs had been powered back on. Interoute reported a short power interruption in a third-party London data centre; the report treated this as the same event, though Interoute did not name the facility.

The outage came less than a year after a high-voltage fault at the site in September 2016, and after another short outage in June 2016. The cause of the July outage was not reported.

Contributing factors

The cause was not reported. EX Networks said the outage appeared to be isolated to the tenth-floor suite.

Lessons learned

1. Floor-level power distribution can fail while other floors stay online, so operators should be able to isolate and restore a single suite without assuming a site-wide loss.
2. Timed customer updates during a short outage help affected parties know when power and services have returned.
3. A further short outage at a site that has already had recent interruptions is a prompt for root-cause work beyond restoring supply.

Source

datacenterdynamics.com