GigeNET Goes Down After Smoke Detected in Data Center

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A "massive power surge" at a GigeNET data center near Chicago led to a power outage that left its hosting customers offline for much of Wednesday evening. The company said the facility remained online after the initial incident, but fire officials ordered GigeNET to power down the data center.

"At 3:24PM Central Standard Time, an incident occurred in the vicinity of our Arlington Heights data center," the company reported on its Facebook page. "A power line went down as a result of an accident. This created massive power surge that was greatly mitigated by our breakers and surge protectors but resulted in one short, inciting some smoke. This was detected by our VESDA double pre-action smoke detection system and the fire department quickly arrived on site.

"This initial incident did not affect our service provision. However, the fire department instructed us to begin an EPO (emergency power off) procedure on our battery backup units as a safety precaution in accordance with the fire department review. The safety inspector and our electricians were required to be on site and ensure a safe power up to safeguard against equipment damage before we were able to move forward. The moment that we were cleared for a power up, we began turning customers back on in phases (as per recovery procedure, so as to not overload PDUs) and with haste."

GigeNET said it would "like to dispel the report that there was a fire at our location" and said no servers were damaged. The company said the downtime was the first since the facility had opened in 2006.

"SLA credits will be given upon receipt of tickets submitted to the billing department," GigeNET said. "We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused you, as your success in business is very important to us. "

Last month, GigeNET reported that it had experienced “tremendous” growth, adding new data center capacity in Los Angeles, in addition to its Chicago, IL facility. In August, GigeNET launched new cluster hosting plans.

In a thread on Web Hosting Talk, a spokesperson from GigeNET said the company is aware of the outage and is “working on getting everything back up as soon as possible.”

Article originally published at: http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/web-host-gigenet-goes-down

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