BT disruption: Telecity owner Equinix owns up to 'brief outage'

Equinix holds up hands in email to customers, blames faulty UPS

Telecity owner Equinix has owned up to the outage that knocked BT and Plusnet customers offline this morning, blaming a fault with one of its uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) for the downtime experienced by internet users across the country.

The company confessed to being the cause of the widespread internet connection problems in a mea culpa email to customers this afternoon. According to the email, the company experienced problems with one of the UPS systems at its 8/9 Harbour Exchange facility this morning, also known as LD8. The problem is still under investigation.

Equinix has admitted the outage, but claimed that service had been restored "within minutes". However, end users across the country reported multiple connection problems throughout the morning. BT claimed that around one in 10 connection attempts at the height of the outage were experiencing failures.

Equinix completed the acquisition of Telecity in January this year for £2.3bn, swooping in to grab the company from Interxion, with which Telecity had been planning a merger.

Equinix, meanwhile, is the world's biggest data centre company and the Telecity buyout greatly extended its presence in Europe. Telecity ran 37 data centres in key locations across Europe, including London, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Paris and Milan.

The outage at Telecity in London, which hosts telecoms networks, including fixed-line, mobile and ISPs, is not the first the company and its users have suffered. A power systems failure at Telecity's Sovereign House facility in November 2015 caused two nights of outages. Indeed, power failures seem to be a recurring problem for the organisation.

Telecity was one of the first organisations in London to connect internet exchange points, key interchanges between different network operators and the backbone internet. Hence, when Telecity goes down, users across the country are affected, if not directly, then via dips in performance of online apps, such as Skype, Amazon Web Services, Google Docs and Microsoft's Office 365 app.