The New Zealand city of Christchurch, on the country’s South Island, has been suffering power outages and connectivity problems do an Earthquake that devastated the city today, leaving at least 63 dead.

 

A number of office buildings belonging to energy and data center providers were evacuated during the quake, which measured 6.3 on the Richter scale, and later in the day many remained unmanned as rescue teams were brought in to search the rubble for survivors.

 

"Some network sites have been badly damaged and are not working and others are operating on battery back-up power."

 

It later confirmed that large parts of the network were down and that calls to 111, the local emergency number, had been prioritized but it seemed even emergency calls were too much for the network. A new number was provided later in the day for emergency use.

 

"Generators have been deployed to provide back-up power to cell sites in key emergency response areas affected by ongoing mains power outages," Telecom NZ said.

 

Mercury Energy said local lines company Orion had experienced network failures while data center service provider 247 Hosting said all of its hosted websites were still operational, but it had routed traffic to the North Island, to Auckland where it has backup servers.

 

"Both Christchurch data centers have lost power and are operating off diesel generators. This will continue with eight hourly fuel deliveries until power is resumed," 247 Hosting said on its website today.

 

"All the support team has been sent home and we will assemble a small team to handle URGENT queries."