Explosion in Downtown Los Angeles Disrupts Data Center Operations

On Thursday night August 20th, 2015, a blast occurred in the basement of 811 West Wilshire Blvd. in downtown Los Angeles taking out an on-site power station leaving 12 buildings in the area without utility power for much of Friday, as reported by ABC News and other sources. The outage significantly affected major network provider Level 3 Communications, LogMeIn, major data center providers Internap and Equinix and several other companies in addition to One Wilshire, one of the most important carrier hotels and interconnection facilities in southern California. The greater LA area has seen a number of power outages within the last month including a three day outage in Long Beach and a power outage at the Los Angeles International Airport.

Issues caused by utility failures and other incidents are not entirely unusual. In fact, Eaton has even created a Blackout Tracker that logs major incidents throughout the United States, and it is clear these types of issues happen with a great deal of frequency. While similar outages have happened around the world over the years, this is a reminder that organizations should never rely on a single data center, no matter how redundant. This is the founding principle of Total Uptime. To give organizations complete control over their network, allowing them to automatically or manually send traffic to alternate sites with as little as 15 seconds of downtime. Perhaps we can do the same for your business.