Trouble for server farms from Vodafone and Interxion

Telecommunications giant Vodafone

Not quite festive were the last days of December for the telecommunications giant Vodafone, which is located near the city of Leeds in Yorkshire, on the Eyre River (England).

At the end of December, due to constant rainfall, the UK was flooded in a number of areas of Lancashire and Yorkshire, rivers overflowed in Manchester and Leeds. The meteorological services have issued more than 300 flood warnings in England, Scotland and Wales. Many substations were disabled and thousands of residents were left without electricity, most of the highways were closed, and rail links to Scotland were interrupted. The consequences of the raging elements directly affected the British server farm Vodafone.


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Flooding led to a crash in the data center power system. The Eyre River (Leeds) overflowed its banks, and the water reached the basement of Vodafone, which is just a few hundred meters from the shore. On Christmas Eve (Catholic), the data center went offline as it turned out to be disconnected from the central electric distribution network. After the data center was switched to a backup power supply system, problems arose due to infrastructure problems and the server farm was left without electricity, while the British customers of the mobile operator experienced problems with voice and data transmission due to the downtime of the server farm.



All malfunctions were resolved only within three days, due to flooding, engineers traveled for a long time to the data center.

Interxion colocation provider ran into security issues

The security problems of one of the leading Interxion colocation providers resulted in the fact that in December of the past year 2015, attackers gained access to a customer database that contained confidential information (names, email addresses, telephone numbers) of 23 thousand Interxion business partners.

Andrew Frye, Managing Director of Interxion's British colocation provider provider, said the data leak was due to a security vulnerability in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) , which was provided to the provider by a third-party software provider, and customers do not have to worry take because the problem is fixed.

Independent IT security experts do not so calmly react to the situation and do not quite agree with Andrew’s statement, because the information that fell into the hands of intruders can be used, at a minimum, for phishing campaigns. Therefore, instead of inaction on the part of customers, experts recommend that in the near future, be careful when using e-mail and other tools for exchanging messages or information.

Literally in October last year, Interxion faced another problem. By a court decision, the Interxion data center in Paris was closed. A group of local residents who live across the road from the data center complained about the noise and proximity of diesel fuel tanks of more than half a million liters. The data center is the source of unceasing noise and is located in a residential area.



The server farm covers an area of ​​9,000 square meters. m, there are eight server rooms. There are UPSs with lead-acid batteries and eight diesel generators with a fuel capacity of 580,000 liters. The court’s decision to revoke the operating permit is based on noise pollution produced by the cooling systems and backup power. The company has invested 132 million euros in the project.



As already mentioned many times, data center downtime caused by an accident, a natural disaster is a very expensive pleasure, and even in a few seconds downtime can result in serious financial and reputational losses.

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