EduServ confirms fallout from datacentre power outage is being resolved

EduServ claims it is in the throes of finishing up the repair work to its datacentre, after suffering a power surge that resulted in a number of client websites and services going offline.

The not-for-profit public sector-focused IT provider suffered an “unprecedented electrical surge” at its datacentre at around 8am on 22 August, resulting in some of the circuits at the facility becoming damaged, the company said in a statement to Computer Weekly.

“The vast majority of services were restored the following day and it is anticipated that the handful that remain will be up and running today, the 24th August,” the statement added. “We are very grateful for the patience and understanding of all of our clients throughout the incident.”

EduServ declined to comment on how many clients were affected by the issue, even though the outage is known to have contributed towards a number of public sector and government websites becoming unavailable over the past two days.

They include the one belonging to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), which was offline for more than 24 hours. In a post-outage statement to Computer Weekly, the data protection watchdog’s deputy chief executive, Paul Arnold, confirmed an investigation into the incident is underway.

“The ICO website is now available and I’d like to thank everyone for their patience while the issues were resolved,” he said.

“Our focus has been on restoring the service and we will now reflect upon and investigate the incident.”

Computer Weekly understands a number of the firm’s local authority clients – including Bristol City Council and Rochford District Council – also experienced website technical difficulties over the same time period, which are thought to be linked to the power outage.

Meanwhile, social media reports claim the incident might also be connected with the fact the websites for the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA), Marie Curie and Scottish Water have also suffered downtime incidents in the past couple of days.

As detailed in EduServ’s most recent company report, filed with Companies House in December 2017, the organisation is in the throes of pivoting away from offering hosting services in its own datacentres, as it repositions itself as a purveyor of managed public cloud services.  

“During 2016/17, the business stopped bidding for private cloud hosting work and new CRM [customer relationship management] development work,” the document states.

“In the second half of the year, the business has been focused on cloud consultancy services, cloud migration opportunities, helping existing private cloud customers develop plans to migrate to public cloud and building capability in application integration.”