Exodus investigates why backup generators failed during outage

by Jennifer Mears

May 11, 2001 —

Exodus engineers are trying to figure out why backup generators didn't kick in during a power outage at the Web hosting firm's Sunnyvale, Calif., Internet data center on Monday.

The company says the data center lost power at about 2:50 p.m. Pacific time Monday because of an "underground vault explosion" on a Pacific Gas & Electric utility line, cutting commercial power to the facility. Power was restored within an hour, a spokesperson says.

Yahoo, which hosts some of its servers at Exodus data centers, said several of its services, including Instant Messenger, chat and myYahoo, were down for about three hours on Monday because of the outage. It was not clear how many other companies were affected by the outage.

In a statement, Exodus said each of its 42 data centers worldwide is equipped with uninterruptible power supply systems and backup diesel generators to sustain operations during a power outage.

"Exodus engineers are performing a root-cause analysis to determine why the Internet data center operations did not roll over to the backup generators and to prevent such occurrences in the future," the company said.

Network World