Power failure at Telehouse North data centre disrupts BT broadband

What happened

On 21 July 2016, Telehouse North, a data centre in London's Docklands and an internet connection partner of BT, suffered a substantial power failure. Telehouse said a circuit breaker had tripped and that this affected a specific and limited group of customers in the building. BT said it was redirecting traffic and that the issue was then affecting less than five percent of customers' internet usage. Engineers were on site.

Telehouse said the problem had been investigated, a solution identified, and engineers were working with customers. It was not reported whether service had been fully restored. The previous day, Equinix reported a separate brief power outage at the former Telecity LD8 site in London, which it attributed to a faulty UPS system, and said service there was promptly restored. BT had said up to ten percent of its customers were affected by that earlier outage. The source reported no direct link between the two incidents.

Contributing factors

Telehouse reported that a circuit breaker tripped inside Telehouse North. The cause of that trip was not reported. The faulty UPS at the former Telecity LD8 site the day before is a separate event and is not a reported cause of this failure.

Lessons learned

1. A circuit breaker trip in a shared data centre power system can disrupt connectivity for customers of more than one network provider.
2. Traffic rerouting can reduce, but not remove, customer impact while engineers are still working on site.
3. Successive outages at neighbouring sites should be treated as separate events until a common cause is established.

Source

silicon.co.uk