Power failure downs Telecity's Canary Wharf datacentre

Customers cut off as mystery glitch takes out mains and backup power

Hosting provider Telecity was hit by a mains power failure yesterday at one its Canary Wharf datacentres, leaving dozens of customers without services.

Telecity warned its customers that an unidentified fault had disrupted the mains power supply delivered to the seventh floor of its Harbour Exchange facility and it had not been able to transfer power to the uninterruptible power supply (UPS) or switch to its generators.

"It took our engineers just over an hour to fix the problem and restore power to those customers affected," Telecity said in a statement.

Nevertheless, while the power supply problem was fixed within an hour, Telecity had to bring its equipment - and that of its customers - back online in stages.

Steve Lalonde, chief technology officer at wholesale voice and data communications provider Entanet, which uses the Telecity datacentre wrote on his company blog that his company suffered problems with its core router following the power outage and had to send an engineer to the site to swap out a failed Flash card.