Service provider, Datacom, has conceded its Melbourne datacentre was damaged by storms over the weekend.
On March 6-7, Melbourne was hit with the worst storm recorded in decades, bringing severe rain and hail and causing millions of dollars in property damage.
Datacom was contacted by ARN yesterday regarding speculation its GlobalCentre datacentre facility was flooded as a result of the deluge and was down for several hours.
Datacom CEO, Michael Browne, initially denied the claim, stating the datacentre experienced minor issues, which had not led to an major outage. He also claimed no water entered the datacentre, but later backflipped and admitted there may have been some water intrusions.
His early comments conflicted with accounts from customers, who set Internet forums abuzz with reports of system outages due to water damage at the facility. SMS messages purported to be from Datacom’s Network Operations Centre (NOC) also surfaced, which stated services were affected between March 6 at 2.30am, and March 7, 4.32am. The messages were accompanied by photos allegedly taken onsite (Click here to view the images).
Upon ARN tendering the photos to Datacom, Browne confirmed the SMS messages and images were genuine and said he had no reason to believe they were altered.
“I would personally describe the result of the storm on our datacentre as water damage but am happy to accept that the event has been described in the initial SMS to customers as a flood and I have no problem with that,” he said in an email statement to ARN.
“I am pleased with the speed and efficiency of the response from Datacom’s staff to this situation and the fact that outage – which resulted from damage to a powerboard – was confined to an isolated group of customers.
“I understand, however, for customers, any outage is a major event and we will continue to work hard to resolve all issues following Saturday’s storm.”
An angry Datacom customer is mounting a lawsuit against the company alleging gross negligence, claiming the outage affected business for more than 12 hours.
Preferring to remain anonymous, the customer which is said to be a managed service provider in Sydney and Melbourne, is attempting to rally up other Datacom clients that were also impacted by the datacentre power issue. “The flooding is almost a secondary issue but an outage of 12 hours for a major Australian datacentre [is] completely ridiculous and negligent on their behalf,” the anonymous customer said in an email exchange titled ‘Datacom Lawsuit’. The sender said the outage was “devastating” to the business.
