I didn't know that Rossendale was in Manchester? Or maybe my Virgin Internet service being out between 8pm and 10pm was a different matter....?

Maybe the headline should be "Lancashire" not "Manchester"...

problem still not been resolved, no internet at work all day, aparently engineers are still trying to resolve it

The fire also affected several other telecoms companies that use NTL/Virgin for their backhaul

I am on the wirral and lost my connection because the fault affected our backhaul which is based in manchester

..thank to this. the office is in rossendale and power was out all day.

From what I hear the Miles platting incident was earlier in the day and may not be connected The incident that turned the lights off in the city was caused by an unspecified failure the other side of town a couple of hours later.

One area that did feel the full effects of the outage was Salford Quays which is home to a number of data centres. It is power failures at these data centres which will have caused the internet to go off line.

When the power went back on most equipment came back on however it all turned on at the same time and so came online out of sequence and in some cases some things didnt turn on at all. domain servers would have come on line before DCs and things came on in safe mode etc.

I personally spent all of this morning resolving issues for customers relating to this power failure ranging from firewalls with corrupted configurations, failed VPNs, missing DNS servers, absent databases. In one data centre we had to power cycle the whole of our hosting infrastructure, routers, switches, firewalls, servers, etc to bring it back online in the right order. On another site we had to turn most things off because the aircon had not come back up and the room was like a furnace.

The power outage appears to have been total in some areas with even street lights and traffic signals going off. In one building we look after 30 staff working late were stuck inside the building because the electronic door entry and locks systems were off line and cars where stuck in the carpark because the barriers couldnt be raised.

I have had better Thursdays

But then again , by blaming arsonists rather then properly monitoring maintaining or upgrading obsolete ancient overloaded equipment means they can claim on the corporate insurance rather then take it out of the annual dividend paid to the company chairman !

Very neat indeed , it is a miracle they have not put the finger on the helpless repressed religious minority said to be involved in the endless Tony Blair War on freedom and democracy ?

But I suppose the local plod armed with a few truncheon induced confessions may yet ride to their rescue for the consideration of a small bribe or two in the right place !!

> "As a minimum personally I would not consider it a proper data centre without full UPS/generator back up."

You would think so wouldn't you? I was thinking along the same lines.

>"The whole system ‘should’ also be tested with a full shutdown (not simulated) at least every six months."

Not always possible when hosting 24-7-365 apps and services.

The other site with the air con problems was a normal office building and the ac was normal office ac controlled from the wall mounted unit. These have a habit of not coming back on after a powercut. The first sign that they havent come on is usually when servers start turning them selves off and someone goes to investigate.

Your last word sums up the problem, investment. The company I work for (A very, very large American Telco) has many data centres, pop sites, switch sites etc around the country which have great monitoring facilities but are sadly lacking any investment in infrastructure so unless something goes bang in a big way we are purely reactive. I have 1 site in Manchester where the aircon cant cope on a mild day, the solution? get some fans in, not even portable aircons, just fans.

What we really need to do is replace the 2 ailing, aging aircon units which, when installed were just about adequate for the equipment that was installed in there, several years of shoehorning more and more kit into any available space has left it just about ready to burst into flames (Perhaps when it does we can have a new ACU?)

I am guessing that the company I work for is not unique about its investment policy, if it (just) works then there is no need to replace it.