Equinix: London Data Center Outage Affected Clients without “Redundant Connections”

*Updated with statement from SSP

Equinix said a brief data center outage at one of its London facilities Thursday only affected a few customers who did not use “redundant connections.”

“Equinix experienced a brief loss of resilience at its LD9 IBX yesterday,” a company spokesperson wrote in a statement emailed to Data Center Knowledge Friday. “A small number of customers that do not utilize redundant connections may have experienced a short period of downtime as a result.”

The statement did not clarify whether it was referring to redundant power connections for servers or redundancy elsewhere in the infrastructure (we have requested clarification).

In an apparent attempt to save face with customers, SSP Worldwide, a provider of technology solutions for the insurance industry that hosts its equipment at the facility, issued a statement following the outage that laid blame on the data center provider. The loss of power, it said, resulted from routine maintenance work by facility engineers.

“The interruption of service does not stem from any SSP solution, the interruption of service is a direct result of the ‘Routine Maintenance’ carried out by the facility engineers,” the statement read.

It's unclear whether SSP has any kind of failover scheme in place to prevent cloud outages. In a statement emailed to DCK Monday, the company's COO, Steve Pearson, avoided answering specific questions about its failover systems but apologized to customers:

SSP’s core service, its Pure Broking cloud platform, has been plagued by downtime issues since at least last year, when it was still running in a company-operated data center. Following a two-week-long outage in August and September, the company said it would fast-track the process of decommissioning that facility and migrating customer systems to two other data centers.

One of the brokers that suffered from that outage, James Woollam with Hayes Parsons, wrote an open letter to SSP, scolding the service provider for poor communication during the incident.

But Pure Broking went down again in November. Multiple brokers told Computer Weekly at the time that the cloud software service had been suffering from intermittent availability and also complained about lackluster communication by the service provider.

At least one customer took to Twitter Thursday to make a similar complaint regarding SSP’s communication about this week’s outage:

The data center where SSP suffered Thursday’s outage is LD9, formerly known as Powergate. It is one of the facilities Equinix took over in its $3.8 billion acquisition of TelecityGroup, closed early last year.

Hayes Parsons’ Woollam was not impressed with the company’s statement laying blame on the data center provider:

The SSP outage started around 12:40 pm local time Thursday. Around 6 pm, the company announced that all services had been restored: