Electrical room fire shuts down Georgetown University data centre in Maryland
Apr 2018Published 13 Oct 2026Responsible editor: Chief Editor
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Companies named in this entry: Georgetown University
What happened
On Wednesday 4 April 2018, shortly after 1pm, a fire started in the electrical room of Georgetown University's Laurel Data Center in Maryland, United States. The facility is the university's primary data centre and is located off campus. According to the student newspaper The Hoya, the fire caused the main and backup power systems to fail, and the facility shut down completely. The university said the redundant power and systems were also damaged in the fire.
Campus-wide services were affected, including the SaxaNet and Blackboard platforms and campus Wi-Fi. Some services were restored on the Wednesday, and most were restored by 10am on Thursday. The university said intermittent interruptions could continue while full restoration took several days. The exact cause of the fire was unknown at the time of reporting. The university had already planned to move its primary data centre to a larger site in Virginia.
Contributing factors
The source does not identify a cause of the fire, which was unknown at the time of reporting. The source states that the redundant power and systems were also damaged in the fire, so backup power did not keep the facility running.
Lessons learned
- Keep backup power and redundant systems physically separated from the main electrical room, so that a single fire cannot disable both.
- Review fire detection and suppression in electrical rooms that house switchgear and power distribution, since a fire there can defeat every level of supply.
- Plan for multi-day restoration of critical services, and maintain failover to an alternative site or cloud platform so that campus-wide services do not depend on one facility.
More lessons on outages, backup supply and restoration, detection and monitoring, from every incident on the register.
Source
Published 2026-10-13. Written from public reporting. Descriptive, not investigative. See the data accuracy disclaimer.
