Interxion suffered a four-hour power outage at one of its London data centers this week, with customers aggrieved by the company's lack of communication during the incident.
The incident occurred around 1800 UTC on Monday evening, with a loss of power at the LON1 site in East London's Brick Lane.
According to The Reg, the outage apparently affected the entire first floor of the data center site. Despite redundant power feeds, it also seems that the electronic switchgear designed to change the power over to an on-site generator also failed, preventing the company from switching between the mains supply and the backup generator supply.
A number of customers were affected; electronic trading at industrial metals market the London Metal Exchange (LME) was unavailable for around five hours from 1 am, with electronic trading only resuming at 6.15 am the following morning; traders were still able to trade via phone during the outage. The issue was an ‘outage at a third-party data center,’ the LME told Reuters.
The exchange, owned by Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing Ltd., migrated all systems to its backup data center and trading was proceeding as normal, a spokesperson said. LME moved to the facility from CenturyLink’s LO1 facility in Slough in 2016.
A number of customers took to social media to complain, saying that the company was unreachable during the incident. The Stack reports the company told customers its customer support systems were taken out with the outage.
Vultr, a provider of cloud-based server infrastructure also reported a partial outage in its London location starting at 1805 UTC, updating to show a complete outage by 1836 UTC. By 2124 UTC, Vultr was reporting that "our data center partner is continuing to work on restoring power to the site.". The company reportedly operations had fully returned by 0136 UTC.
“We are currently experiencing a major outage due to failure of multiple (allegedly resilient) power feeds at Interxion, over 90 minutes ago. Unfortunately as @interxion have still failed to share any information and refuse to answer the telephone, we do not yet have an ETTR,” web hosting company Sargasso Networks tweeted on January 10.
A source whose employer is a member of the London Internet Exchange (LINX) told the Reg that there was "a flurry of emails on the member's mailing list covering the full spectrum from concerned (about what's going on and the possible extent) to angry (about lack of comms and inability to get hold of anyone from Interxion)."
The company later shared a statement saying: “At 1810 on Monday, 10th January, Interxion’s Hanbury Street facility (LON1), experienced a critical power interruption, which impacted some of the mains control equipment and caused outages across the services in LON1. The problem was quickly identified and services started to come back online from 1945 until 2230 when the facility returned to operational status.”
The company apologized “to all our customers and partners affected and for difficulties communicating during the outage” it said, adding “a full investigation is underway to determine the root cause of the interruption, the findings of which will be used to ensure an even more resilient infrastructure in the future.”
Interxion has 15 London data centers and three campuses in the capital. Its Hanbury Street campus comprises of LON1, LON2, LON3 and totals 9,400 sqm (101,000 sq ft). LON1 provides 5,400 sqm (58,100 sq ft) of space across five floors; the Stack notes the facility has around 14 backup diesel generators.
