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17 Mar 2011
Web sites hosted at a site managed by UK datacentre firm BlueSquare Data went offline on Thursday after fire alarms connected to the site's uninterruptible power supply (UPS) went off, causing the system to power down automatically.
The Maidenhead site hosts servers managed by numerous companies who took to Twitter to reveal that BlueSquare Data had informed them that a fire risk had caused the problem.
Other firms posted up information they had been sent by BlueSquare data on their web sites, such as managed hosting firm EtherClear.
"The fire alarm has been activated in the UPS [uninterruptible power supply] area and as procedure the power has been suspended and the fire brigade has been summoned," it read.
A further update from the firm explained that three of the five UPS systems were affected by the alarm and this caused the mains supply to automatically turn off and generators to kick in.
"Generator power was restored to the site at approx 10:35 and individual power to racks has also been restored," they said.
"At this time we are running on raw generator power until the UPS manufactures can prove the status of the three failed UPS systems. Once this has been completed we would then expect to switch back to mains power with UPS protection in place beforehand."
V3.co.uk contacted BlueSquare Data for comment but had received no reply at the time of publication.
Individual web site owners also revealed they had been affected, such as a jewelry shop called One Brown Cow based in Wiltshire.
"We are sorry to inform our customers that our web site remains unavailable due to a fire at the #BlueSquare data centre," an update read.
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Do you agree?
@ Alan
The issue in bsq 1 was caused by Thames Water cutting a power cable and the generators not cutting in from the UPS correctly. This issue was totally with the UPS system and not related. Oh and V3, thanks for mentioning us! We weren't too affected by the issue as our clients are mostly based in BlueSquare 1, unfortunately our own systems are in 3 so were knocked out.
Posted by: Toby, from EtherClear 30 Mar 2011
Strange outcome
A system should not respond in that way. The local fire-alarm (spurious or not) in the UPS should have put the UPS to no-break bypass and, shortly afterwards started the gensets with a no-break transfer of the load from the raw mains to the generators. If you are evry unlucky a mains failure might occur before the gensets came on-line but that would be like being hit by lightning in your lounge. Only if the main building fire alarm was activated would you expect the mains to be switched off - and even then only by the action of the firemen using the firemans switch.
Posted by: Ian Bitterlin 18 Mar 2011
Phew
Well at least my sites are back on now, it's amazing how quickly people want to tell you your site has stopped working!
Posted by: Phil 17 Mar 2011
Just bad luck???
Interestingly Bluesquare #1 had a total power outage about a month ago... Just bad luck or perhaps a more interesting design flaw? Just goes to show there will nearly always be single points of failure, so is an expensive data centre really that much better than a well designed server room?
Posted by: Alan 17 Mar 2011