Macquarie data centre loses water supply

Emergency water repairs near Central Station may have led to a short outage at the Macquarie Data Centre in Sydney early on Saturday morning, affecting its hosting customers.

A spokesman for the data centre said it lost water supply late the night before, affecting its air conditioner.

It switched to secondary and tertiary backup cooling systems and auxiliary power, the spokesman said.

Equipment in the managed services area was turned off after 7am Saturday AEST.

"The managed hardware area was restored and operational by 9am," the spokesman said.

Indications are that a leaking nearby fire hydrant may have cut water services to buildings, although its timing is in dispute.

A spokesman from Sydney Water's maintenance division confirmed emergency-repair crews attended a hydrant but he said it happened on Sunday.

"We had no reactive jobs and no presence in the area [on Friday or Saturday]," a spokesman for the utility said.

Macquarie Telecom said its operations manager informed Sydney Water of the issue early Saturday morning.

The company cited internal operations and its own Sydney Water sources.

Macquarie told its customers, including iTnews, using text messages on Saturday morning when it was clear that the servers would need to be shut down.

Customers on the Whirlpool forums reported shutdown of some servers and indicated they had sent techies onsite to manage other equipment.

The core network was unaffected.

The data centre spokesman told iTnews that Macquarie Telecom was "reviewing [its] engagement processes" with Sydney Water to determine why it wasn't informed of the emergency maintenance sooner.

A post-incident report will be issued shortly.

As a result of the issue, iTnews and sister sites Computer Reseller News, Secure Computing, PC Authority and Atomic went offline briefly Saturday morning. All were restored by 9am.