Vancouver Power Outage KOs Plenty of Fish

An underground circuit fire caused a major power outage in Vancouver yesterday, which disabled traffic lights and cash machines and also led to lengthy outages for web sites hosted at the Harbour Centre telecom hub. The main generator supporting the Harbour Centre failed, cutting power to a data center operated by Peer 1.

Among the sites affected by the five-hour outage were Plenty of Fish, the massively popular free dating site operated by Internet entrepreneur Markus Frind. Plenty of Fish is known for supporting huge web traffic on a lightweight infrastructure, as well as Frind's ability to generate revenue using Google AdSense. Other sites affected by the outage included the web host services Bravenet and Blue Fur.

Peer 1 kept customers informed via its forums, and President and CEO Fabio Banducci posted a post-mortem and timeline shortly after service was restored, in which he explained the generator issue:

Harbour Centre was able to get the generator working by 3:40 pm local time, and Peer 1 restored power to customers by 4:20 pm. At 5:55 pm the building was back on utility power. Banducci emphasized that Peer 1 would fully honor its customer service level agreements (SLAs) and take steps to avoid a repeat of the outage.

Harbour Centre is a 28-floor skyscraper in the central business district of downtown Vancouver, which also serves as the city's primary telecom and data center hub. The building's description of its telecommunications infrastructure states that the property has six diesel generators ranging from 250 kilowatts to 1.5 megawatts in capacity.