Australian Internet Service Provider iiNet says its Christmas day outage was caused by a cooling system 'malfunction’.
The company suffered an outage at its Perth data center over the Christmas period, with users unable to access iiNet website and domain email services. iiNet services were still reportedly affected up to a week later.
At the time the company said the outage was caused by the “extreme weather event in Western Australia” which saw consecutive days of temperatures above 40°C (104°F). The heatwave caused blackouts across the region.
An iiNet spokesperson this week told itNews that the incident was caused by a failure of the data center’s cooling system.
“In the afternoon of December 25, the extreme heat in Western Australia resulted in several servers shutting down and loss of connectivity after the cooling system malfunctioned at the iiNet data center.” the spokesperson said. “The iiNet website, iiNet domain email services, and the iiNet customer call center were affected.”
“Customer services were restored early on the morning of December 27. However, iiNet email customers may have experienced some email delays over the following days as the email backlog was cleared.”
iiNet's Perth facility suffered an outage in 2015 due to heatwave conditions, and in 2018 due to site power loss.
In New South Wales, a consortium led by Telstra will help develop a proof-of-concept digital twin of telecommunications towers and assets in the region to assist the government in reacting to disasters, including wildfires. A mouse plague across Australia also caused multiple telco outages last year.
