Another web hosting giant was hit by fire when a city-wide power disruption started in their area. LA-based web hosting provider, WebNX experienced fire at their Utah data center as announced last April 5, 2021.
The incident started with a power disruption in Ogden, Utah which automatically switched on WebNX’s backup generators, as is often the case in power outage situations. However, one of their old generators had a mechanical failure and caught fire.
In a statement released by WebNX via their social media pages, “One of our old generators that have worked for years and was recently load tested had a mechanical failure and caught fire resulting in power being cut to our core routers and fire suppression system controlling the fire. Unfortunately, the fire department opted to cut power to the rest of the building as a precaution even though the power systems were independent.”
According to the company, no customer servers were damaged by the fire. However, some of these servers may have been exposed to water and possible damage may have occurred. These machines will have an extended outage since they may require rebuilds due to the water damage.
Updates by WebNX
The company has been very helpful to their customers and clients by providing up-to-date information via their social media pages. Just a few hours after the incident, the company has posted the status of their servers on their Facebook page and has opened channels for its customers to reach the company.
The company also upholds its service level agreement to a high standard, which guarantees 100 percent uptime to its customers. With this in mind, clients whose business and websites have been disrupted by the incident will receive account credits of one day per 15 minutes of downtime.
A post was also released last April 8 by the company, stating “The last few days have been very long, hectic, and crazy as we are sure it has been for you as well. While this is not the last update, we hope that this will at least give you an idea of what steps you need to take in regard to your server located at WebNX in Ogden, Utah. As of this moment, all of the servers not directly affected are back online. If you are unable to access your server, it can be assumed it is currently down and will remain so until it can be inspected for any damage in the coming weeks. We are optimistic that the vast majority of data stored on these servers is recoverable. Several servers racked in the vicinity of the incident have resumed operation without trouble.
Our focus going forward is to restore functionality and connectivity to as many servers as possible. Every hour, more and more servers are brought back online, and we will continue in that effort over the coming weeks.”. WebNX’s customer portal is now back online for support requests.
Data Center Industry Learnings
In early March of this year, the data center of cloud services firm, OVH, was also caught in fire in France. This was just a month prior to the WebNX incident. According to Data Center Frontier, this will most likely “intensify the data center industry’s efforts to re-evaluate assumptions about fire protection”.
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