Four fire engines and “around 25 firefighters” were called to a fire at a Telstra data centre in London’s Isle of Dogs this morning.
“A small part of a supply room on the third floor of the building was damaged by fire” London Fire Brigade has confirmed.
The fire was at Telstra’s London Hosting Centre (LHC) at 6 Greenwich View Place, E14, and has knocked out power for half the building.
See also: Equinix Outage: Power Failure Leaves Customers Fuming
The company said in a recorded message on its helpline that the meant it has “lost the green system: this provides power to the lower half of the building.
“The fire has tripped the breakers supporting the bus bar. Engineers are on site and working to restore power by generator as we speak.”
The LHC has eight generators on site.
Firefighters were called at 08:31 and had the fire out by 09:30.
Four fire engines and around 25 firefighters have been called to a fire on Greenwich View Place in the #IsleOfDogs. More info to follow pic.twitter.com/sLHQat1d4e
— London Fire Brigade (@LondonFire) August 27, 2020
Unconfirmed reports suggest the fire was triggered by a faulty Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) — the same issue that triggered a 14-hour outage at Equinix’s LD8 data centre on August 18; it is turning into a poor month for DC providers.
The LHC is a nine-story building with over 114,000 square feet of data centre space, with the capacity to host over 1,800 IT racks.
Telstra could not immediately be reached for further comment.
Telstra LHC Outage
We have received reports that multiple SIP servers are offline. Upon further investigation all powered equipment in Telstra LHC went offline at 09:17 BST. We have been informed there are multiple fire engines on site and a suspected UPS fire on the 3rd floor— Everything Voice (@EverythingVoice) August 27, 2020
This site was the first to offer an alternative colocation facility to Telehouse, and was operational in early 1999. Australian PTT Telstra acquired its operator in September 2004, including the London Hosting Centre.
The Colo-X website notes that early tenants “included Digital Island (acquired by Cable and Wireless and then Vodafone), FLAG (now part of Reliance/Global Cloud Exchange) and Savvis (now part of Centurylink).”
It adds that “like all Docklands facilities, because of the age of the site, network choice is fairly strong in LHC but not quite as good as the carrier-neutral sites nearby operated by Telecity/Equinix, DRT or Telehouse.”
Read this: A Closer Look at an AWS Outage
