(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — An electrical fire late Thursday at Seattle’s Fisher Plaza (www.fisherplaza.com), a “business community” providing data center space along with office and retail space, caused a power outage that resulted in extended periods of downtime Friday for several high profile customers, including payment processor Authorize.net, Microsoft’s Bing Travel service, domain registrar Dotster and hosting provider AdHost.
A report on Data Center Knowledge points out that the downtime at Authorize.net affected thousands of merchants, leaving them unable to process credit cards while the service was down.
According to the same report, power to the facility was restored early on Saturday morning, and several of the customers returned to service. This was after other customers, including Authorize.net, used backup facilities to bring their services back online.
Fisher Communications, the bulding’s owner, issued a statement about the outage on Friday, saying “Last night at approximately 11:10 pm, an incident in a garage-level electrical room disrupted power to Fisher Plaza East and knocked out the facility’s backup generation system. The electrical room is where Fisher Plaza East receives its power from Seattle City Light.”
The statement appears to be published in full here.
The company says there were no injuries, and that it is working closely with Seattle City Light and other outside experts to investigate the cause of the incident.
Data Center Knowledge says the facility suffered a similar electrical outage in 2006, and that Fisher Communications recently put Fisher Plaza up for sale.
Overall, it was a bad long weekend for data center fires leading to hosting outages, as PEER 1 saw a fire in Toronto knock its facility offline Sunday.
About Liam Eagle
Liam Eagle has worked as a contributor to the Web Host Industry Review since its inception in 2000, and as editor since 2003. He has been editor of the WHIR's print magazine since its launch. His daily involvement in the gathering and reporting of Web hosting news and his regular interaction with Web hosting leaders gives him an uncommonly broad appreciation of the issues and tends facing the business. Through his WHIR blog, Liam spots Web hosting trends and offers opinions on the industry-wide impacts of major developments and the motivation behind big announcements. Follow him on Twitter @liameagle
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