Cooling failure causes Dimension Data data centre outage

A cooling system failure has caused outages for several Dimension Data customers hosted in the company’s Victory Park data centre, an industry source has told MyBroadband.

According to the source, Dimension Data appointed a new vendor that serviced the data centre’s air conditioners on Monday.

At around 04:25 on Tuesday morning, 75% of the facility’s air conditioning shut down due to a major failure, causing equipment to overheat.

The source said several row-end switches failed, leaving multiple customers without an Internet breakout.

At around 12:20 on Tuesday, new switches had yet to arrive at the data centre, and portable air conditioners had been set up to help cool the facility.

By 12:55, the facility appeared to be back online, albeit on the back of the portable air conditioning units.

Dimension Data’s call centre and senior management were unaware of the issue until clients informed them about it, the source told MyBroadband.

Dimension Data operates 11 data centres on the African continent, nine of which are in South Africa, including Johannesburg, Cape Town, Umhlanga near Durban, East London, and Gqeberha (Port Elizabeth).

In partnership with Growthpoint properties, Dimension Data is busy finalising the construction of its Johannesburg 1 data centre.

Located within the Centralpoint Innovation District in Midrand, the data centre will feature 6,000 square meters of hall space and offer 12MW of critical IT load.

Construction of the data centre is running behind schedule, and Dimension Data parent Nippon Telephone and Telegraph (NTT) told MyBroadband that they plan to commission the facility during Q4 2022.

NTT acquired Dimension Data in 2010. In 2018, NTT confirmed it would transfer Dimension Data into a new holding company under its brand.

The reorganisation was completed in 2019, with Dimension Data operating as a brand within the global NTT Ltd group.

MyBroadband contacted NTT for comment, but it did not provide feedback by the time of publication.

Update — 17:19

NTT provided the following statement.

“We can confirm that a technology outage occurred on 6 September at the Victory Park data centre. This outage was due to an air handling unit failing. The engineering team onsite have since resolved the failure, with a single customer impacted during the outage.”

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