Electrical meltdowns at a National Security Agency’s (NSA) data centre in Utah have delayed its opening for a year, ruining equipment worth almost a million dollars.
The $1.4bn Utah plant, built to boost data gathering and surveillance capabilities, sits on about 247 acres and includes 1.2- milion-square-feet of enclosed space.
The Wall Street Journal revealed that the Utah facility experienced 10 separate electrical failures over the past 13 months, burning out and damaging about $100,000 (£85,000) worth of computers and other equipment.
The project documents also revealed that the civil contractors were confident the problem had been resolved, while the army investigation of engineers said the cause of the problems had been identified and that a contractor was now correcting it.
The recent disclosures by Ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden has brought the NSA under scrutiny over its data snooping activities, including the Prism programme that gathers data from tech giants including Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Yahoo.
NSA has also been alleged of garnering data on phone calls made by US citizens.
