Christmas Floods Take Out Vodafone Data Centre In Leeds

Vodafone voice, data, and IT services were affected by flood waters in Leeds last week as engineers struggled to access a data centre to install emergency generators.

The flooding in the North of the UK over Christmas saw waters rise to critical levels, causing misery for thousands upon thousands of residents all over Yorkshire, Cumbria, and other areas in the North West and North East.

The Vodafone site, located in the Kirkstall Road area of Leeds, was hit particularly bad by high water levels as the Aire river burst its banks on Christmas weekend.

Severe

Vodafone told TechWeekEurope: “One of our key sites in the Kirkstall Road area of Leeds was affected by the severe flooding over the Christmas weekend, which meant that some Vodafone customers in the North East experienced intermittent issues with voice and data services.

“We had engineers working from Boxing Day to mitigate any customer impact.  However, it was clear that it would take a little time for us to repair the damage caused to the site. Once we were given access to the site we installed generators and other recovery equipment and have now restored full service.

“We sincerely apologise for any inconvenience caused to customers.”

Vodafone told TechWeekEurope that the main issue was the inability to access the site to install generators once the back-up batteries ran down.

The severity of the flooding in and around Kirkstall Road can be seen in this video uploaded to YouTube last week:

The leader of Leeds City Council, Councillor Judith Blake, said in a statement: “This weekend Leeds has been hit by devastating flooding unprecedented in its severity. Our thoughts and the focus of all our efforts are rightly on working with all agencies in the city to help those worst affected in order to protect life and to restore our road networks and power supplies as quickly as possible.”

Network provider BT was also heavily affected by the floods, especially in the city of York.

A BT spokesperson said: “The York BT exchange has been damaged by flood water and our engineers are currently repairing damage to the building’s power supply.”

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