Trip switches
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When clumsiness strikes in the data centre...
Have pirates severed undersea fibre-optic cables? Have Chinese cyber-terrorists launched a coordinated attack on the communications infrastructure of the West? Has an over-zealous US telco throttled the network?
When Internet connection goes, these are just some of the nightmare scenarios that IT and comms managers, dosed up on caffeine and scare stories, might call to mind.
But most times, the cause is less exciting – like on 18 September, when UK Internet service provider AAISP noticed that all of its customers were no longer connected to the network.
AAISP’s web service depends on a link between two London data centres. The ISP managed to track the fault down to one of the data centres, managed by Telecity, and alerted the company.
According to AAISP’s status blog, it took less than ten minutes to find the root of the problem. “
This really is something we could not have expected to happen,” a blog posting that documented the outage explained. “The man from Telecity, who says ‘sorry, that was my fault’, described as an ‘idiot’ by the man from Datahop [the company which manages the connection between the two data centres], managed to knock out at least five Datahop ports, so affecting a number of ISPs.
“He then proceeded to plug them back in randomly,” the blog post continues.
“Datahop have their own engineer who will be on-site to unravel the mess as they have banned the Telecity engineer from touching anything,” it concludes.
Further reading
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