The blaze at JBJ business park broke out on Friday in a tiling warehouse, and spread to other units within the park, damaging equipment belonging to networks company Level 3. This knocked out internet services in the region up to 50 miles away.
The Mercedes AMG Formula 1 team were among the businesses disrupted by the blaze when they had to move their support team from their base in Brixworth to Brackley during last Sunday’s Singapore Grand Prix. Their race preparations were not affected, however.
In a statement, a spokesperson for Level 3 said:
A fire originating in a building adjacent to Level 3’s network facility in Northampton spread to our facility, resulting in damage to equipment.
Our local technicians are working to restore services as quickly as possible, and we are in close contact with all affected customers.
At this time, we do not have an estimated time when all services will be restored.
Businesses in the area have reported that their internet has been down for as much as five days since the blaze broke out, however many of the services have been temporarily re-routed to neighbouring exchanges. The problems facing businesses underlines the potential vulnerabilities that internet connections face, particularly in an era of digital communications being vital to business continuity.
One business owner called the disruption “catastrophic,” adding that “without doubt” they are losing trade.
The importance therefore of networks that are protected at the earliest stage from the risks of fire has never been greater.
In a blog in 2010, IT expert Tom Olzak gave these key requirements for a business-friendly fire suppression system:
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This sounds like a much bigger issue. Five days of down time due to losing one building makes me wonder a couple things. First why was this location chosen for a Level 3 pop and second do they not have a way to temporarily deliver services to this area while the pop is being brought back online. An ISP can’t exactly predict a fire in another company’s space but it seems odd that they couldn’t contain the fire well enough in their own space to prevent the outage and that they don’t have a plan in place to bring services… Read more »
I agree the down time was excessive, it would make me wonder if this scenario had even been considered by the provider. When working on DR and trying to determine our sites and vendors we always look for providers that dont utilize necessarily the same resources so that if one were to fail we would still have a back up. I understand however that SMB’s probably cant afford to have that kind of redundancy but with extended outages like these I wonder how many of those businesses will now possibly fail as a result.
Does indeed sound odd. I would expect quicker and better contingency plans
It’s alright if you’re an F1 team with a massive budget to move your support team to another site, but if you’re the small business owner you don’t stand a chance.
I had thought that this was similar to evacuation routes in a building, with the ability of alternative routing by employing at least two distinctly different routes so that whilst a fire or flood might destroy one route there would normally be an alternative. Looks as though lessons could be learnt here. Makes a key communication facility rather more vulnerable and, as been pointed out, a killer for smaller business that don’t have alternaive operating facilities lcated elsewhere.
Level 3 isn’t exactly a newcomer to the ISP game. I’m sure that they have some kind of DR for every site that they manage. I just wonder what went wrong.
Not knowing the detail it is hard to comment on the specifics but it highlights the need for all business to check out the resiience of their vendors/suppliers.
I have visited a number of data centres and noted that they know little about the surrounding exposures but concentrate on what is happeining inside their own 4 walls. Did they foresee this threat?
@ safeNsane, both your points are valid and worth searching for answer. Obviously they can’t predict fire in someone else’s space, but it makes it even easier for them to take necessary measures because they have ample time to anticipate that fire is going to affect them too. About contingency plan, well, that is simply not comprehensible for me how they could not have a backup plan running for five days.
In today’s world and business, five days disruption is a tediously long time. I can understand that one business owner terming it “catastrophic” without any doubt. Now when all the communication is done via emails and online trade is the norm of the day, five day internet service outage can seriously harm businesses.
Seriously surprising, isn’t it? It’s not like power lines, I would have thought re-routing would have been relatively straightforward. Shows what I know, i suppose.
When your job is to make sure the data centre stays operational, you’d have thought that the logical step would be to first mitigate internal threats, and immediately after to mitigate external threats. If what you’re saying is correct and few data centres are worrying about what’s going on outside their door, that really surprises me. And surely they’ll be in for a nasty shock, too.
Well, my business (eg. this website) would be closed, which would obviously be disastrous. I like to think we’d be ok, but then we were taken down earlier this year by a DDOS attack, so who knows?
Surely the network point should be an isolated building, not even attached to other buildings like this? If it is, there really should have been seriously over-specced fire stopping materials in place in my opinion.