Colt Data Centre Suffers Fire And Power Outage In Milan

Colt’s Milan data centre suffered a power outage this week, knocking its cloud services out for nine hours.

The exact cause of the power outage is not yet known, but Colt told TechWeekEurope today: “Colt experienced utility power supply outages at its Milan Lancetti Data Centre on July 6th. The vast majority of customer services have been fully restored and the utility power supply is stable. Colt continues to monitor the situation closely and is taking every possible action to mitigate risk for our customers.”

Photos from a publishing company affected by the outage show smoke rising from the building and firefighters on site.

“Major power outage”

Sebastien Zdrojewski, a CTO and SysAdmin worker based in the city, tweeted: “Sorry people at #Netweek a major power outage at @Colt_Technology datacenter in Milan is keeping us down. Firefighters are on site.”

This week saw temperatures in the northern Italian city hit 36C, a factor which could lead to power problems in data centres as the cooling systems work in overdrive to regulate server temperatures.

Another IT worker said on Twitter that the problem may have been caused by overheating in the power units.

This morning, Zdrojewski said that the data centre was back online: “Major power outage (now solved) in @Colt_Technology @datacenter caused about 2 hours power down on 6th July in Milan.”

Colt runs 22 carrier-neutral data centres across Europe, mainly serving financial firms. The company says it manages over 56,000sqm of data centre space in Europe.

In April, up to 1.5 million Three customers were without service on following an electrical failure at a data centre in Ireland.

A Three spokesperson said: “This has occurred due to an electrical failure at one of our data centres which caused an increase in temperature in the building and then subsequently impacted some systems affecting customer service.”

Three has around 2 million customers in Ireland, and is now the country’s second largest mobile network provider following 2014’s O2 acquisition. Tesco Mobile users were also affected, as the firm uses Three’s network.

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