Orcon’s datacentre on Auckland's North Shore went down on Monday morning.
The power outage was caused by an 11,000 volt power cable that failed at around 5.36am, according to Orcon.
Orcon says that its UPS and generator kicked in immediately after the outage, but a datacentre customer says that his servers went down just before 7am, which seems to indicate that the UPS system only has capacity for around 90 minutes.
Just before 9am yesterday the company sent an email saying “back up services are operating but there have been unexpected short outages to some services” and “co-located customers are still experiencing power outage”.
Up to 500 customers are affected by the power outage, said Orcon marketing manager Duncan Blair. Orcon and Vector staff were working to restore power, he said.
"Everything should be back to normal [around] mid-day," he said yesterday.
This is the second known datacentre issue at Orcon this year. On January 16, the same North Shore datacentre overheated, reportedly reaching temperatures approaching 30 degrees celsius when the norm is around 20 degrees.
Blair said at the time over 500 servers were hosted at the datacentre and none went down because of the heat. Extra air conditioning was installed to alleviate the problem.