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Comments on Monday 2 June 2008:
My servers were both down for the last few days. Why? An explosion! It's now back up at last, and I'll be getting three days worth of email (including bonus piles of "did you know the server is down?") all in a jumbled wrong order trickling in over the next 24 hours or so.

In the words of the ISP:
On Saturday, May 31st at 4:55pm CDT in our H1 data center, electrical gear shorted, creating an explosion and fire that knocked down three walls surrounding our electrical equipment room. Thankfully, no one was injured. In addition, no customer servers were damaged or lost.

We have just been allowed into the building to physically inspect the damage. Early indications are that the short was in a high-volume wire conduit. We were not allowed to activate our backup generator plan based on instructions from the fire department.

(...) we are working to bring it back online as quickly as possible.
They did pretty well, considering. Some 3000 servers to bring back up on emergency power. [19:36]

Anet
Welcome back... ThePlanet hope to have all back to normal-ish within 2 weeks. I have been checking out their (and other) forums most of the week. Any idea if this is the biggest situation of its kind? I've asked, no one seems to have heard of one quite this bad before.

RavenBlack
No idea. Sounds quite impressive though, an explosion taking out the power for thousands of servers.

Their setup seems a bit flawed though - apparently there will be several hours of downtime when they switch things back over to the mains. There *should* be enough UPS support for the servers that a few hours would be covered.

Anet
erm... perhaps. They had quite a few problems with the massive volume involved...
http://www.syndicatedelitist.com/2008/06/theplanet-outage-update.html

old, but some of the few pics.

siddharth
wht was the cause of this ?
can servers be disturbed due to high traffic ?
I mean physical damage

RavenBlack
No, the traffic is not relevant, it's the high power requirements that are dangerous. Slightly faulty wire will get hot, melt its casing, melt the casing of the adjacent wire, short circuit across the two of them and boom. Something like that.
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