back to article Korean telly factory power cut costs Samsung $30,000+ per second

Samsung Display has suffered a power outage at one of its LCD plants that could cost the firm tens of millions of dollars. Lights went out at the Samsung Electronics' telly division plant in the western city of Asan for around 10 minutes last night, the Yonhap news agency reported. A Samsung official said that the plant's key …

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  1. James 100
    WTF?

    Only "key facilities" protected

    If the "key facilities" were unaffected thanks to a UPS but they still lost tens of millions of dollars from a ten minute outage, they have a different definition of key facilities than I do!

    I can imagine some Samsung tech saying to his boss now "remember that $100k backup generator I wanted, that you said was too expensive...?" Of course, I remember the department which said "pay internally for backups of our server? Why'd we do that, it's been running fine for years - oh, what does 'TTS backout failure, unable to mount SYS' mean?"

    We got one of those at work too, after a long power cut took out all the servers - only protects the core network and servers, though, all the edge switches are still unprotected and tend to need manual power-cycles after a power cut. Official answer is "they should all be on a UPS"...

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Only "key facilities" protected

      Did you miss the part where it said this was a FACTORY?

      This ain't your little "kwonwledge economy" toys - servers and network gear - little boy. You're not going to power a production line out of UPSs and generators.

      Unless you happen to own a power plant, of course - but have you seen the price tag on those?

      1. Bob H

        Re: Only "key facilities" protected

        I've worked in a facility where they had a 5MW gas turbine, but that is because it was fairly economical to generate power on-site and they still had dual feeds from the national grid (probably because a certain large German power systems company kept breaking the power from the turbine!).

        But I agree, a factory like the Samsung one, which would be vast, couldn't generate much power on-site and I also agree the original poster is a Muppet.

  2. JMiles

    Meanwhile, workers also reported seeing a ghostly figure of a man in a turtleneck. Company insiders denied that the outage was in fact the work of Steve Jobs' spirit.

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    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Powering a factory

      >On one of the access roads next to Luton airport, there is a strange building with some huge fuel tanks.

      Yep had the same experience working for a large US semiconductor company who learned the hard way why you should also regularly test failover as well. All the fuel in the world does you no good in most production lines if everything goes down for even a second as bringing everything back up is not as simple as flipping a switch when you have things like Silane gas and Hydroflouric involved. Anon for a reason.

      1. Gavin King
        Coat

        Re: Hydroflouric

        I know I really shouldn't, but:

        Wet flour is a sticky horrible mess to clean up, isn't it?

  4. bigphil9009

    Does this part of Samsung make the "Retina" displays for Apple's gear? If so, I would be surprised if they remain loss-making for long - would spinning them off not make them an attractive target for an acquisition by the big A? Could this be Samsung shooting themselves in the foot? Or have i got the wrong end of the stick?

    1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

      No it's just any old LCD fab, competing with lots of other cheap chinese LCD fabs in a market where everyone has already got a big LCD screen

  5. Armando 123

    Believable

    In 1999, there was apower outage in downtown Chicago that cost the US economy about $1 billion. And that's Chicago, where the government takes everything. I can only imagine what the cost would be in a free economy like Korea.

    1. Figgus

      Re: Believable

      It cost the GOVERNMENT 1 billion. The private sector was only out 98 cents after taxes.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Just shows that we can't rely on wind power for a constant stream of power.

  7. Simon2
    Flame

    Generator

    Even the local independent Nisa Todays (Harry Tuffins to be specific) supermarket in my town has a Diesel Generator that can power the whole store (including walk in fridge and freezer out the back) if there's a power cut (which isn't very often). You can hear it through out the whole town when running.

    If they can afford a generator surely Samsung, a multi billion $ company, can.

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