(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — A massive outage at the state of Virginia’s data center in Chesterfield brought many critical services to a halt, according to a report by Data Center Knowledge.
More than 220 servers at the facility went offline Thursday, left at least 24 state agencies stranded without IT support, reported local media.
During the outage, the state was unable to process child support payments and help needy families, as well as assess new claims for unemployment benefits or applications for driver’s licenses, according to a report by the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
Virginia IT Agency head Samuel Nixon Jr. told the Richmond Times-Dispatch that while it was “disappointed to have a failure,” outages are “going to happen on occasion.”
The outage was caused by a hardware failure in a storage area network.
According to Nixon, the outage occurred when technicians for a storage vendor were performing a routine check for faulty equipments.
Despite affecting 228 of 3,600 servers, Nixon said that the state computer data “are largely intact.”
One of the websites affected by the server outage included the Virginia Information Technologies Agency.
Virginia has already faced criticism in the past for not having a reliable IT infrastructure in place.
Last fall the state experienced rolling outages after it neglected to include network redundancy in its 10-year, multi-billion dollar outsourcing deal with Northrop Grumman. Earlier this year, the state restructured the contract.
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