Latest downtime publications

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA for short, relies on the data centre to observe changes in weather, climate, oceans and coast, tapping data produced by a network of 90 buoys and 60 network stations located on piers, lighthouses and beaches.

We sat down with Dr. Dennis Cronin, CEO-Americas at the Data Center Incident Reporting Network, to understand why establishing a global database of data centre incidents has benefits for everyone involved in the sector.

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 impacted customers throughout the day on social media.

Law firm Slaughter and May have lambasted executives from TSB and parent company Sabadell over the catastrophic core banking migration that locked two million customers out of their accounts in April 2018. 

The migration from Lloyds Bank systems to TSB’s new in-house core banking platform Proteo4UK led to money disappearing from customer accounts, halved Sabadell’s 2018 profits, and eventually forced out TSB CEO Paul Pester.

Slaughter and May’s 262-page report, said to have cost £25 million to produce, criticised the TSB board for failing to “fully understand the scope and complexity” of the new IT system and found Sabadell’s IT arm Sabis guilty of failing to test the system on one of the two data centres it relied on.

Last Thursday, UK network provider Three was blighted by a network failure that left customers without access to the internet or voice services for almost 10 hours.

As is the way with such outages, many of Three’s 11.7 million customers turned to Twitter to condemn the downtime, prompting the #threedown hashtag to surge to third in the day’s trending charts.

Over the weekend, details finally emerged about the failure’s cause, with Three revealing in a weekend email sent to customers that data centre maintenance work triggered the network issue.