Third Outage This Year for Primus Facility

A Primus Telecommunications data center in Melbourne, Australia lost power Sunday, marking the third outage this year for the facility at 55 King Street. The outage disrupted service for a number of Australian ISPs and phone services. The same facility suffered power outages in February and again in May due to issue in its power infrastructure. After the incident in May, Primus Australia CEO Ravi Bhatia told local IT media that "from 8th May onwards the centre will be beyond bulletproof."

Primus said the power backup systems didn't work as intended after a utility outage. "One of the emergency diesel generators failed to start due to a synchronization processor failure," the company said in an email to customers. "Contents of the synchronisation processor's register are being analysed to ascertain the true cause of failure."

The Whirlpool site summarized the impact of Sunday's outage. "The power dropped around 3:45PM and caused Victorian and Tasmanian customers from ISPs such as Exetel, iiNet, Internode and Netspace to lose their broadband connections," Whirlpool reported. "Internode was able to route around the problem by 4:15PM, while the other ISPs were back online around 5:30PM." A forum thread on the outage runs 24 pages.