Power failure at Regio IT data centre disrupts services in about 100 councils in North Rhine-Westphalia
Mar 2026Published 12 Oct 2026Responsible editor: Chief Editor
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What happened
On Monday 2 March 2026 at about 19:30, the power failed at the data centre of Regio IT, a municipal IT service provider, in Aachen, Germany. The emergency generator started, but it did not prevent damage: a central network component failed and systems went down. Internal specialist applications, service portals and email access were disrupted or fully unavailable in about 100 municipalities in North Rhine-Westphalia until the morning of Wednesday 4 March.
Affected services included motor vehicle registration, job centres, registration procedures and citizen portals in towns from Aachen to Duisburg, Bonn, Gelsenkirchen and the Bergisches Land. Regio IT reported the fault fixed on the Wednesday morning. According to the managing director, as reported by WDR, it was not yet clear how the outage could occur despite the emergency power supply. The emergency number 112 remained reachable.
Contributing factors
The source does not establish why the emergency power supply did not keep the systems running, and it does not explain the initial mains failure. A central network component failed during the outage. At the time of reporting, Regio IT had not answered the publication's questions about the background.
Lessons learned
- Test whether backup generators and UPS systems can carry the full facility load, including core network equipment, and not only the power supply path.
- Provide redundancy and failover for central network components whose failure can take many services offline at once.
- Where many public bodies depend on one facility, agree fallback procedures and communication plans for outages lasting more than a day.
- Publish a timely root-cause account so that customers and regulators can judge whether the fault is addressed.
More lessons on outages, backup supply and restoration, worker safety and safe systems of work, from every incident on the register.
Source
Published 2026-10-12. Written from public reporting. Descriptive, not investigative. See the data accuracy disclaimer.
