Telehouse, a co-location facility provider for major internet companies including the London Internet Exchange (Linx) and Claranet, suffered a power failure earlier today at its Docklands site.
The outage at the 13,000 square-metre building affected the Claranet DSL platform and some mail servers, Telehouse said.
The cause of the failure has been identified as a phase supply, which had burned through. This needed to be replaced, leading to a planned power down at midday. Claranet said: "We do not yet have an estimate of how long this process will take or a complete list of affected services. However customers experiencing difficulties accessing any internet service can reasonably expect that this is down to the fault as so much of the UK's internet infrastructure resides in Telehouse.
A spokeswoman for Linx said the company had not been affected by the outage, since it runs what she described as "diverse power feeds across all its sites. She said Linx had also installed its own power back-up systems at Telehouse.