JuliannaWebnames.ca apologizes to customers who experienced a loss of service on Monday, July 14 2008 between 10:45am and 5:00pm PST. We acknowledge that your inability to reach us by phone or email during this time may have been distressing, and are taking every measure to resolve outstanding issues as quickly as possible. Customers affected by a delay in email delivery would have had their emails delivered last night and this morning
As most of our customers know by now, downtown Vancouver experienced a massive power outage which has carried over to Tuesday, July 15. Over 20% of the downtown core was – and in many instances continues – to be affected from an underground fire that rendered businesses of all types, traffic lights, bank machines and the Internet useless.
Below is an image of the affected area from the BC Hydro website and their most recent update.
For a second day, Webnames.ca staff is working from secure remote locations answering emails and helping customers via an online messaging service due to a power loss at our Gastown offices. The power loss has affected our phone lines which will be operational soon.
Along with numerous other Vancouver-based Internet service companies, Webnames.ca was affected by a loss of service at Peer1. Failure of the main back-up generator caused two of Peer 1’s data centres to experience 90% and 100% power loss. Fabio M. Banducci, Peer 1’s President and CEO posted the following update late yesterday on the company’s forum:
At 9 AM [Monday, July 14 2008] , BC Hydro reported that a number of electrical circuits failed in downtown Vancouver, British Columbia due to an underground fire on Richards Street that caused a power outage to approximately 2,200 customers, including the Harbour Centre building where PEER 1’s Vancouver Data Centers are located. BC Hydro crews began working to determine the extent of the damage, but had difficulty accessing the man-hole where the fire originated due to extensive smoke and heat.
Harbour Centre’s main building generator, Gen No.7, started and maintained power as designed, but failed 20 minutes after the loss of commercial power due to a failure in the generator’s cooling system. Gen No.7’s cooling system is dependant upon water provided by the city of Vancouver and requires a certain level of water pressure to function normally. As fire fighters worked to put out the fire that had broken out on Richards Street, water pressure in the downtown core, (including Harbour Center), declined to a point where it caused the generator to overheat and malfunction.
Once the generator failed, PEER 1’s UPS systems eventually failed as well once the UPS batteries had drained. After three more failed attempts to bring Gen No.7 online, the generator successfully came online at 3:40 PM and restored power back to our Data Centers, our UPS systems, and our client servers. At 5:55 PM, utility power was fully restored to the Data Centers.
The Peer 1 outage in turn impacted some of our email and Web Builder customers on Monday. DNS, Web hosting and other services were not affected.
Webnames.ca would like our customers to be assured that our website and all services are fully functional now and have been since yesterday about 5pm PST. Again, we apologize for any inconvenience and thank all our valued customers for their patience during these extraordinary circumstances.