Downtime: Hostway, Telecity

There have been several data center outages this week that have led to downtime for hosting services and web sites. Here's a quick roundup:

Hostway said that its Austin, Texas data center experienced a power outage at about 10:30 am Central time on Thursday. The company said the outage was tied to "the electrical lines feeding the network room where downed servers are located." Generator power was brought online and within 90 minutes Hostway reported that servers were coming back online. And yes, we're aware that the outage came shortly after Data Center Knowledge posted an Industry Perspectives column by Hostway founder Lucas Roh on the topic "Outages in the Cloud: A Learning Experience.". "Outages will continue to occur," Roh writes. "The best approach is accepting the risk and using them as an internal learning tool to be sure your company’s data is backed up and secure. ... After an outage, quality service providers will analyze the data to identify any weak processes. Once the root cause is identified, the provider needs to learn and adapt by implementing new procedures and safety checks."

On Wednesday Telecity Group lost power at its Meridian Gate data center in London, apparently due to a fault in a breaker in the power distribution system, reports DataCenterDynamics. "“We have resolved a power outage which affected our Meridian Gate data center earlier today," Telecity told DCD. "Our engineers responded quickly and restored power to the facility within around 20 minutes. We kept all affected customers informed throughout the process and have apologized for the disruption."