Redbus Interhouse suffers power outage

Lights out at colocation centre

By John Oates • Get more from this author

Posted in Telecoms, 16th June 2004 11:47 GMT

Understand how application security is evolving

There are red faces at Redbus Interhouse this morning after a power failure forced many of its customers offline late yesterday afternoon.

Harbour Exchange Square suffered a power outage on the eighth floor between 16.57 and 17.38 although many customers had to wait a lot longer before their systems were restored.

One irritated customer wrote: "We are a client there and at 19.40 are still waiting for their engineers to get round to turning on our equipment again … we are NOT happy. Our office is 65 miles from the datacentre, but we still could have driven there, turned the equipment back on and be a third of the way back to the office in the time it is taking!"

Mike Tobin, chief executive at Redbus Interhouse, said: "We are still investigating but it seems a high voltage transformer failed. It gave a warning which activated the UPS system but didn't activate the generator. We are very sorry and customers with SLAs will of course be compensated." He said the area hit had a high number of smaller customers' equipment.

Another customer emailed The Reg to say: "Given that they promise '100% uptime' of power, and are supposed to have backup generators, this is pretty shoddy."

Customers expressed sympathy for engineers but asked how such a thing could happen and whether there was a procedure in place for such an emergency.

Redbus customers enjoy "100% Service Level Agreement" and "stable high-capacity power supplies". It has three storage centres in London, and others in Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Milan and Paris.

Redbus was started by serial entrepreneur Cliff Stanford, the founder of Demon Internet. ®