UPS battery fire cuts power to Chief Telecom data centre building in Taipei
Feb 2013Published 13 Oct 2026Responsible editor: Chief Editor
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What happened
On 25 February 2013 a fire broke out in the Liyuan Building, the headquarters of Chief Telecom in Taipei, which houses data centres. The Taipei City Fire Department judged that the fire started in the electrical and mechanical room on the second basement level, in UPS battery equipment owned by eASPNet, another operator in the same building. eASPNet said routine UPS maintenance was under way. While equipment was being replaced, the high-voltage batteries connected to the UPS overheated and smouldered, releasing dense smoke.
Firefighters required power to the whole building to be cut. Data centre services were down for more than 12 hours, and the outage contributed to a widespread internet disruption in Taiwan. Firefighters found more than a hundred UPS batteries connected in the basement battery room.
Contributing factors
eASPNet attributed the event to work carried out during routine UPS maintenance, while the equipment was being replaced. The iThome article attributes the overheating to a battery problem that raised electrical resistance, which is the trade publication's analysis and not a confirmed finding. The article says the battery room held more than a hundred connected batteries and that high-voltage UPS batteries generate heat under load. No investigation finding on the cause has been reported.
Lessons learned
- Isolate and verify high-voltage battery strings before and during equipment replacement, and use written procedures with checks at each step.
- Monitor battery string resistance and temperature, and use thermal scanning of UPS and battery connections during maintenance, so that resistance faults are found before they overheat.
- Plan for the building-wide power cut that a battery fire can force on fire services, and keep dual power paths and failover arrangements for critical IT load in multi-tenant buildings.
More lessons on worker safety and safe systems of work, detection and monitoring, fire suppression and firefighting, from every incident on the register.
Source
Published 2026-10-13. Written from public reporting. Descriptive, not investigative. See the data accuracy disclaimer.
