Telecity Data Center Outage in London Dings Cloud, Internet Exchange

Two consequent power outages at one of TelecityGroup’s data centers in London Tuesday afternoon local time disrupted operations for many customers, including the London Internet Exchange and AWS Direct Connect, the service that connects companies to Amazon’s cloud through private network links.

The provider’s Sovereign House data center in the London Docklands lost utility power and appears to have failed to switch to backup generators around 2pm. Power was restored but went down again, according to an incident report by EX Networks, one of the customers in the data center.

London-based Telecity has not yet said what the root cause of the data center outage was.

The facility is one of the data centers housing infrastructure of the London Internet Exchange, or LINX. Telecity told EXN it would have to shut down power to two suites that house LINX to fix the electrical infrastructure.

“Telecity are also installing six new power feeds from the non-affected train into the LINX suite in order to retain some service,” an EXN update read. “EXN will shut down affected peers during this work, however some minor disruption to connectivity services should be expected.”

AWS Direct Connect customers that use the service to connect their infrastructure at the Sovereign House data center to Amazon’s cloud data center in Ireland, which houses the cloud’s eu-west-1 availability region, experienced packet loss as a result of the interruption.

“We can confirm intermittent packet loss between the Direct Connect location at TelecityGroup, London Docklands, and the EU-WEST-1 Region,” an AWS status update on Tuesday read. “An external facility providing Direct Connect connectivity to the EU-WEST-1 Region has experienced power loss.”

Amazon said power had been restored about two hours later.

Sovereign House is one of eight data centers Equinix and Telecity have agreed to sell as a condition for regulatory approval for the planned merger. Redwood City, California-based Equinix announced it will acquire Telecity for $3.6 billion in May.