Power outage at Vodafone data centre in Germany disrupts M-Pesa in Kenya

What happened

A power outage at a Vodafone data centre in Germany damaged server disks that helped host the M-Pesa mobile money service run by Safaricom in Kenya, according to Safaricom Kenya as reported by ITWeb Africa. The damage stopped Kenyan users from sending money, making deposits, withdrawing cash and completing other transactions. The disruption occurred over a weekend in late October 2012. Services were reported to have been restored by the Sunday evening. The source does not give the town of the site, the exact start and end times of the outage, the cause of the power loss, or the full extent of the damage.

Contributing factors

The source attributes the damage to a power outage at the Vodafone data centre. It does not state the cause of the power loss, whether backup power or uninterruptible supply operated, or whether the damage was caused by the outage itself or by the restoration of power.

Lessons learned

1. Hosted financial and payment services should confirm that their data storage is protected against power loss, including the risk of damage to storage hardware.
2. Operators relying on a third-party data centre should contractually confirm the power redundancy and recovery arrangements of that site.
3. Customer-facing services that depend on a single hosting location need a tested fallback or failover plan to limit the impact on users and agents.

Source

itweb.africa