Equinix power outage downs VoIP, tweets up a storm

Twitter has been flooded with complaints about a power outage at Equinix's Sydney data centre which apparently knocked out data and network systems, including VoIP.

Equinix operates facilites in Europe, North America and the Asia Pacific regions, with the one in the data centre in the Sydney suburb of Mascot suffering the reported failure.

Equinix's Sydney office could not give any details about the outage at this time.

VoIP service provider MyNetFone issued a statement on its blog about a power outage today.

“We apologise for the service interruption on Thursday 2nd July 2009 between 11:40am EST and 1:00pm. The problem was caused by a nation-wide power outage which triggered a total loss of power at our co-location facility in Sydney.”

According to MyNetFone, as soon as power was restored our engineers were on-site restoring our systems.

“There was no loss of data, and the service has now been fully restored. We are awaiting a formal incident report from our co-location provider who is meant to have emergency power systems in place for just such an incident. Clearly things did not work as planned.”

MyNetfone uses the Symbio Networks platform at Equinix for VoIP peering.

MyNetFone says it will take the lessons learnt from this incident to see how it can improve services and “make them more reliable in future”.

According to AusNOG mailing list member Patrick Wu, “Our gear lost power at Equinix, plus our PoP at Petersham (in Sydney) lost power and UPS kicked in... Some of our customer sites went out in the west as well.”

“Global Switch got hit as well and generators kicked in and nothing is lost over there,” Wu wrote in an e-mail.

Here are what some posts to Twitter related about the outage.

@MichalAndrzej: Equinix has a major blackout! their supposedly redundant systems have failed causing Sydney wide blackouts on VOIP and yes, I am affected!

@alexjcampbell: Major issues with the power grid across Sydney. Equinix went down, our Sydney datacenter GlobalSwitch handled it perfectly!

@jakereazn: Equinix Outages give me the sh*ts.

@Twitter :: @alexjcampbell: For those wondering why large parts of the Australian interwebs are down - the Equinix datacenter in Sydney has lost power.

@Netsnipe: is shouting out to all the sysadmins out there who were affected by the power outage at the Equinix datacenter in Sydney an hour ago.

@aussiepythons: There are power issues at the Equinix data centre and APS seems affected. Sorry folks, hope to be back up soon.

@alanjlee: @jodiem Could be related to a power issue at Equinix in Sydney.. a bunch of sites went offline/back online such as Yahoo.

@druey: Possible Equinix power failure affecting MyNetFone.

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