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Nov. 5, 2008

A major power failure at Verizon in Rondebosch, a suburb of Cape Town, South Africa, left thousands of people unable to access their websites on Nov. 1st, after the hosting provider's generator failed to kick in, according to numerous reports over the weekend.

IOL (Independent Online), a local publication in South Africa, said its news site was "hard-hit by the crash" and even popular SMS chat applications like M-Xit were unavailable for most of the day, leaving "thousands of people unable to communicate with others."

A spokesperson for Verizon told IOL that its generators failed to turn on after the back-up battery "crashed under the strain as the generators failed to switch on automatically."

A user that goes by the name RPM in the MyBroadband.co.za forums elaborated on the Verizon outage explaining that "South African utility provider Eskom's disruptions were anticipated on Saturday as the city had planned scheduled maintenance. Verizon's standby generator power was expected to carry the load as the maintenance was to affect their electricity supply. Regrettably, Verizon's generator failed, which resulted in the core network shutting down."

Despite the lack of updated information on Verizon's website, which seems to be the unofficial "norm" with how service providers keep their customers "in-the-loop" in situations such as these, IOL says most of the service seems to have been restored as of late Saturday.

Verizon said its Telkom trunk line had also been affected and engineers were working on restoring the line. Verizon's office in Cape Town provides bandwidth to around 140 companies in South Africa, including the Mount Nelson Hotel, Scania trucking, Masterfoods and wireless Internet service provider iBurst.

There was yet another outage on Oct. 30 when cloud storage provider FlexiScale was hit with its second outage in less than two months, leaving some customers without access to their servers for more than 18 hours. Some took even more than 21 hours to be back online.

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Source: SAR.