Hurricane Electric Suffers Data Center Outage in Silicon Valley

Hurricane Electric, provider of colocation services in Silicon Valley and operator of the world’s largest global IPv6 network saw one of its three Silicon Valley data centers go down Wednesday.

It’s unclear what time the outage at Fremont 1, located in Fremont, California, started. The company’s first tweet about it went out around 11:30 am Pacific Time, saying the cause had been identified and that it was working on a resolution.

Its global network had not been affected, Hurricane Electric said.

We’ve reached out to a Hurricane spokesperson for comment and will update this post once we get more details.

Fremont 1, located at 760 Mission Court, is a 45,000-square foot facility that hosts two internet exchange points (SFMIX and AMS-IX Bay) and 20 internet networks, and serves as an access point to six carriers, according to the company's website.  

Based on tweets by several non-Hurricane employees, the downtime appears to have been caused by a power outage. It’s unclear why the facility’s backup power and failover system did not function properly.

The company said around noon that systems were restarting.

Some customers complained that Hurricane’s updates about the outage on Twitter lacked relevant detail. They wanted to know whether the outage was due to a power or a network problem. That information, they said, would help them decide how to best go about restoring their systems.

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Customer communication problems were exacerbated because the company’s phone and email systems are hosted at the facility that went down. That’s according to Mark Welch, who leads channel sales for the company’s global IP transit business.

Hurricane operates a second data center in Fremont and a third one in nearby San Jose.

Last year, the company reached a milestone by becoming the first network in the world to connect to more than 4,000 IPv6 networks. It became the first to connect to 1,000 IPv6 networks in 2010.