Telehouse Power Supply Fault Causes Disruption for Some UK ISPs
Internet connectivity from a number of broadband ISPs was affected this morning (6am) after a major datacentre in London (Telehouse North) suffered a fault with one of their Power Distribution Units (PDU), which created smoke and triggered the firm alarm (the building was naturally evacuated).
The majority of people won’t have noticed the connectivity problems because power was largely restored by 7:30am (roughly when the bulk of us start to wake up for work) and providers usually know how to work around such issues, although a number of ISPs across the United Kingdom did report some disruption to their networks.
Readers might recall that the UK suffered a string of nasty data centre related faults during July 2016 (here), including one that involved a major power failure stemming from Telehouse North and that also occurred during the same early morning period. However today’s disruption has so far been much less significant and full service should be restored any minute.
We should add that Telehouse Europe is currently in the process of launching a new £135 million data centre in the London Docklands area, called Telehouse North Two. The new site has a total power capacity of up to 73 MVA, which includes a capacity of up to 50 MVA from the substation and 23 MVA from six additional commercial power feeds.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on Twitter, Google+, Facebook and Linkedin.
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at 20+ years old its time to send this old dog to the great datacentre farm in the sky..
Lol! Just imagine the disruption that would cause. 🙂
Depends on who you ask..
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2007/03/14/did-terrorists-target-uk-data-center/
http://web.archive.org/web/20070313213315/http://timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article1496831.ece
It’s concerning that so much critical infrastructure is concentrated in one small part of the country. Can the UK’s internet connect to the rest of world without going via London?
yes
https://www.linx.net/all/tech-info-help/network-topology
the exchanges connect various networks and their international connections together.
Indeed, walking past the BT tower you can see all the servers in the surrounding building. Be easy to take out
To my knowledge Linx don’t have any kit in the BT Tower or the attached exchange – is it MUSeum?
They’re mostly in purpose built datacentres with significant security features.
Server rooms don’t usually have windows, so if you can see the kit it suggests to me that it’s something else – network components like routers or switches.
Servers? Lol
Comms rooms don’t usually have windows hopefully you haven’t already taken it out and got arrested