Update 13/03/2018: 

We’re getting reports of a new outage at a Telecity data center and will update as we learn more (Update: Go here for the latest). If you have information, please let us know at [email protected]

Original story:

One of colocation provider Telecity’s London data centers, Meridian Gate, lost all of its power on Wednesday morning, causing problems for tenants and their clients, bringing down numerous websites.

One of the tenants, provider of colocation, managed services and network connectivity called C4L, reported on its website that the facility, one of its core colocation sites, had suffered a complete mains power outage. “The UPS and generator failed to kick in, taking all customers offline and breaking the 10G ring,” C4L wrote in an update to its customers.

Telecity representatives told C4L that the outage was caused by an issue in the power distribution system. “Following the power incident at Meridian Gate earlier today, we have identified a fault on a breaker in the power distribution system,” a Telecity note to C4L read.

In an emailed statement, Telecity spokesperson wrote: “We have resolved a power outage which affected our Meridian Gate data center earlier today. Our engineers responded quickly and restored power to the facility within around 20 minutes. We kept all affected customers informed throughout the process and have apologized for the disruption.”

This was Telecity’s second London data center outage this month. According to earlier news reports, seventh floor of the company’s Harbour Exchange data center lost mains power in early July, bringing down customer equipment located on that floor.

In addition to affecting customers at Meridian Gate, this week’s outage affected C4L customers located elsewhere by bringing down the company’s network equipment at the site. Half of C4L’s Infrastructure-as-a-Service platform was also affected.

C4L first lost both of 10G fibre network legs to Meridian Gate around 9:15 am BST. The company reported in an update about 20 minutes later that power had been restored and both fibers had come live. “At this point we were also contacted by our Telecity account manager to explain power had been restored to mains,” C4L reported.

According to C4L, the data center was running on mains and not on generators around 9:40 am.

Here’s are a few highlights of Twitter responses the outage generated:

• Initial Rewards, an online marketing services firm, saw the online loyalty stores it sets up for customers go down as a result of the outage, according to the company’s Twitter feed. The company’s main website, www.initialrewards.com, remained inaccessible as of 11 am PDT.
• Steve Henderson, with email marketing company Easy Inbox, Tweeted that the Telecity outage had taken one of his company’s services down.
• An employee of BlueLevel, an online multimedia agency, said in a post that the company was having “server issues” and was waiting for an update, pointing to the C4L post about the outage.

As it often happens in events like this, competitors of the company suffering downtime try to seize the moment and lure away some of its customers.

Data center provider Advantage Interactive was subtle in posting on Twitter only words of compassion: “Sympathy sent to Telecity customers in relation to the power outages, oh the joys of Docklands data centersÔǪ”

Another competitor, Datanet.co.uk, was not so subtle. A Twitter user named Paul Bygrave, wrote in his feed: “Any annoyed #telecity customers looking for a change? Call Datanet.co.ukÔǪ”