Equinix confirms review under way into UPS failure at Docklands datacentre

Equinix is conducting a review into the resiliency of its power supplies after an outage at one of its London-based datacentres blighted the operations of hundreds of clients on 18 August 2020.

The colocation giant suffered a power outage at its LD8 IBX datacentre in Docklands, which is the home to one of the 11 points of presence for two of the London Internet Exchange (LINX) peering local area networks (LANs).

According to a statement on the LINX website, about 150 of its members – which include website hosting companies, internet service providers and telcos – are estimated to have run into connectivity issues because of the incident.

“All LINX members connected to those LANs at LD8 will have lost connection to LON1 and/or LON2 when they lost power to their own equipment,” said LINX in its statement. “Simultaneously, we lost power to our own A and B power feeds and subsequently our equipment within LD8.

“We anticipate that approximately 150 LINX members will have been directly affected by this incident. Additionally, LINX members located in other facilities may have lost or impaired interconnection with those members who are directly affected.”

Following an initial investigation, Equinix confirmed that the outage was caused by a faulty uninterrupted power supply (UPS) system at the site.

“Equinix engineering teams diagnosed the root cause as a faulty UPS system and worked throughout the day to remediate the issue,” said the company in a statement to Computer Weekly.

“All services have now been restored. As the reliability of our datacentres is our top priority, Equinix is conducting a thorough review of this incident in order to prevent any future issues.”

The problems are understood to have begun just after 4.30am on Wednesday morning, with some of those affected still reporting via social media into the early evening.

However, the company’s handling of the outage has seen it come in for criticism on social media, with a number of those affected by the downtime asking why it took the firm about seven hours to acknowledge the issue. One said: 

Had to find this info out through other sources this morning to know what on earth was going on. An update 8 hours in, with no ETA on when we might have connectivity again isn’t really good enough.

– Scott Fuller (@scottindeed) August 18, 2020