Fujitsu Suffers ‘Five-Day’ Cloud Outage

Fujitsu’s California data centre loses power, knocking out IaaS services as investigation continues

Fujitsu has confirmed that it suffered a “significant outage” in the company’s Californian data centre in August, subsequently knocking outs its cloud services.

According to a source speaking to NetworkWorld, the outage lasted for up to five days.

Transformer failure

Fujitsu told NetworkWorld: “On August 22, 2015 (Pacific Daylight Time), the public power provider to Fujitsu’s Sunnyvale facility experienced a major transformer station failure, causing a widespread power outage.

fujitsu“As a result, Fujitsu’s Sunnyvale datacenter and the services it delivers (including the Fujitsu TPS5 public cloud, the Fujitsu private hosted cloud as well as other infrastructure services) were impacted. Fujitsu immediately notified customers and provided support to minimize impact.”

Fujitsu offers a range of cloud services, selling Infrastructure-as-a-Service solutions to customers globally.

The company calls its Sunnyvale data centre its flagship. The data centre has recently undergone a multi-million dollar upgrade and expansion. At the data centre, Fujitsu claims to have deployed Silicon Valley’s first hydrogen fuel cell, which provides a portion of the facility’s power.

Fujitsu has not responded to TechWeekEurope’s request for comment at the time of publishing.

Google also suffered a cloud outage in Europe in August as lightning strikes killed the power in the company’s Belgium data centre.

Four successive lightning strikes that affected the power running to the data centre were the cause of the four-day cloud outage, Google admitted.

From Thursday August 13 to Monday August 17, errors on Google’s Compute Engine persistent disks in its Belgium data centre caused a blackout for a small portion of customers in Europe.

Take our data centre quiz here!