An open and honest approach with customers paid off for M12 Solutions and its ISP brand, Giganet, when a massive power outage shut down the London Docklands based Equinix IBX LD8 data centre for 18 hours.
The outage, reportedly caused by a faulty UPS, was said to have affected, amongst others, BT, Sky, Virgin Media, Exponential-e and FluidOne customers as well as Giganet’s.
At the time, on the Giganet/M12 status page technical Director Matthew Skipsey criticised Equinix for not providing detailed information on the outage and feared it would have a knock-on effect.
“Completely unacceptable situation ongoing in LD8 (HEX 8/9) right now. Lack of communication is abysmal. Equinix need to sort out the basics,” he said.
“After this incident we suspect there has been a lack of resiliency and we’ll be sure to raise this after the incident is resolved as it is clearly unacceptable to experience a power outage of this gravity. Although this incident is affecting Equinix LD8, we are seeing signs of intermittent packet loss/increased latency at varying times for leased line and broadband circuits terminating in another of our data centres, Telehouse North.
"We are speculating, because of the scale of this outage, and the carriers and suppliers affected, that there could be knock-on impacts around the carrier ecosystem/networks."
Giganet went on to provide a steady feed of incident updates on their status page which, according to M12 Managing Director Andrew Skipsey, was well received by their customers and other industry businesses affected.
“Our open approach to informing and updating our customers via our status feed was the main conduit of information to the industry. Thousands of businesses would have been impacted by their leased lines going down, which obviously impacted voice and other applications.”
In a tweet, Robert Fitgerald, Network and Systems Manager at Box Broadband said: “Thanks for your updates on the Equinix saga. We’re another AltNet affected indirectly with our leased lines via FluidOne being down. Your updates have been more comprehensive than any other so far.”
Andrew Skipsey added: “My team was brilliant on the day acting speedily to mitigate those who were impacted and then revert diverts this morning. I only took two calls through the day from customers who wanted to reach me about their disruption, and both were already up to date via our status page.”