Equinix Admits To Power Failure That Knocked Out BT Internet

Data centre operator Equinix has admitted that a power failure in one of its data centres this morning is to blame for taking down BT’s broadband services for many customers in the UK.

The Telecity LD8 data centre in London’s Docklands houses equipment for the London Internet Exhchange (LINX), which provides BT with some of its broadband services. Equinix acquired Telecity for £2.3 billion last summer.

‘Brief’

Equinix’s UK managing director Russell Poole told TechWeekEurope: “Equinix can confirm that we experienced a brief outage at the former Telecity LD8 site in London earlier this morning. This impacted a limited number of customers, however service was restored within minutes. Equinix engineers are on site and actively working with customers to minimise the impact.”

This was not good news for LINX, which is one of the largest internet hubs in the world, connecting more than 700 networks from over 65 countries. BT said that up to 10 percent of its customers were affected by the outage.

“This morning between 07:55 and 08:17 BST there was a loss of power at Telecity Harbour Exchange,” said LINX in a statement. “This power failure was not specific to LINX; other operators in the same building also lost power to their equipment.”

“Power was restored to all our equipment by 08:17 BST, apart from a single device. Members with redundant connections will have found their service return to normal at this time. Power was fully restored at 09:15, which is the point we consider the incident window to be closes,” LINX said.

BT’s own service page acknowledged the problems this morning and on Twitter, and said it had looked to resolve the issue as soon as possible.

“We’re sorry that some BT and Plusnet customers are experiencing problems accessing some internet services this morning,” a BT spokesperson told TechWeekEurope. “This is due to power issues at one of our internet peering partners’ sites in London.”

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