Fire system test shuts down power at Reserve Bank of Australia data centre
Aug 2018Published 13 Oct 2026Responsible editor: Chief Editor
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What happened
On 30 August 2018, shortly before 11am, routine fire control systems testing was carried out incorrectly by an external party in a data centre operated by the Reserve Bank of Australia. The error triggered an unplanned shutdown of all primary and back-up power supplies to the data centre, cutting off every technology system running from it, including those supporting the RITS interbank settlement system. The Fast Settlement Service for New Payments Platform payments recovered after about three hours, and RITS after about seven and a half hours, against a two-hour recovery objective.
The RBA's assessment states that Austraclear remained operational throughout the outage. A feed summary reports delays to CHESS, SWIFT PDS, CLS and PEXA, which the RBA's assessment does not address. All transactions submitted to RITS on the day settled by the end of the day. The Bank reported that RITS achieved 99.83 per cent availability in 2018, below its 99.95 per cent target.
Contributing factors
Incorrect execution of fire control systems testing by an external party removed primary and back-up power at the same moment. Recovery was slowed by the loss of ancillary support systems, delays in gaining access to highly secure systems, difficulty for technicians obtaining privileged access, loss of RITS monitoring services, and loss of access to documentation holding support procedures. Prioritisation of FSS recovery delayed the start of RITS recovery. The Bank considers a repeat of the combination of factors that obstructed automatic failover highly unlikely.
Lessons learned
- Control and supervise testing of fire suppression and alarm systems by external contractors so that it cannot cut power to live critical systems.
- Test the simultaneous loss of primary and back-up power, not only single failures.
- Keep recovery procedures, monitoring tools and privileged access available independently of the affected site.
- Set recovery priorities for interdependent services in advance so that one service's restoration does not delay another's.
More lessons on worker safety and safe systems of work, outages, backup supply and restoration, from every incident on the register.
Source
Published 2026-10-13. Written from public reporting. Descriptive, not investigative. See the data accuracy disclaimer.
