A Dataport data center in Germany suffered an outage on May 7.
According to updates posted on the Dataport website, the outage began at approximately 11.30 am local time, and is hoped to be resolved by Monday, May 12.
Dataport has ruled out a cyberattack as the cause of the outage, suggesting that it was instead related to a "network communication."
The issue at the data center brought down the operations of the tax offices of Bremen, Hamburg, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Lower Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, and Schleswig-Holstein. A restart of the responsible servers helped to restore partial functionality.
By today, May 9, the hardware responsible was fully identified and is being replaced, with commissioning and testing planned.
Dataport operates the "Twin Data Center," which is comprised of two identical facilities. The company's website states that it offers 2,090 sqm (22,500 sq ft) of data center space, expandable up to 3,450 sqm (37,140 sq ft).
The company operates its own data centers purely to serve the justice and tax systems in the UK, with the company stating: "Each data center is an encapsulated and multiply secured area within a BSI-certified data center. In the Justice Data Center, we process data from five federal states; in the Police Data Center, we process data from four participating states. We operate the Tax Data Center for a total of six states."
Dataport is a secure IT infrastructure provider for the public administration across Germany. The organization is a not-for-profit public-law institution and was founded in 2004 through the merging of ICT service providers of the states of Schleswig-Holstein and Hamburg.
In 2006, the states of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania (IT services for tax administration only) and Bremen joined Dataport’s circle of owners, with Lower Saxony joining in 2010, the local authorities of Schleswig-Holstein joined in 2012, and Saxony-Anhalt signed a contract for joint ownership in 2013.
Norderstedt is a city in Germany and part of the Hamburg Metropolitan Region.
Frankfurt is Germany's main data center market, but Düsseldorf, Berlin, Hamburg, and Munich have also drawn in operators in recent years.
