UPS failure behind Equinix LD8 data centre outage

Second time in five years that UPS failure causes outage at LD8 facility in London’s Docklands

A UPS failure was behind the data centre outage at Equinix’s IBX LD8 data centre on Tuesday that caused network issues for a raft of customers.

The former Telecity facility is home to the London Internet Exchange (LINX), one of the world’s largest Internet Exchanges with over 700 members including ISPs such as BT and Virgin Media.

Issues at the London data centre were first reported around 4am Tuesday morning and impacted companies including Giganet, Epsilon, SiPalto, EX Networks, Fast2Host, ICUK.net, and Evoke Telecom apologised to affected customers throughout the day on social media.

Giganet was one of the first companies to report network issues and the company vented its frustration at the resiliency of the facility, which experienced a similar outage in 2016, on its incident report page.

“We lost both A+B feeds to 1 of our 2 Equinix LD8 racks at approximately 4.23am,” the company said.

“This follows a UPS failure, which then triggered the fire alarm in the data center according to reports from Equinix. The rack that we have lost power to houses our core Juniper MX router and Cisco LNS. The Juniper MX router is our core device which is needed for everything in LD8 to function, including terminating a number of leased line connections as well as providing connectivity to our vDC platform. All our equipment power suppliers are dual fed with ‘diverse’ A+B power feeds provided by the data center – however after this incident we suspect that there is a lack of resiliency and will be sure to raise this after the incident is resolved as this is clearly unacceptable to experience a power outage of this gravity.”

Equinix published a statement acknowledging the outage at 12:04 PM BST before confirming on social media at 9:54 PM that the issue had been resolved.

“Today, the Equinix LD8 IBX data center in the Docklands, London, UK experienced a power outage that impacted customers based in the facility,” the company wrote.

“Equinix engineering teams diagnosed the root cause a faulty UPS system and have worked throughout the day the remediate the issue. All services have now been restored,” it added.

Equinix inherited the LD8 data centre following the US company’s acquisition of Telecity for $3.8 billion in 2016.

Founded in 2018, Equinix is a leader in global colocation data centre market share, operating 205 data centres in 25 countries on five continents.