Data Center Knowledge

Rains Flood Seattle T-Mobile Data Center

Posted By Rich Miller On December 4, 2007 @ 1:29 pm In Downtime | Comments Disabled

Torrential rains in the Pacific Northwest have flooded a T-Mobile data center [1] in Bothell, Wash., affecting customer activations and the performance of the Tmobile.com web site. The outage reportedly took down servers supporting T-Mobile service activation portals, company web sites and myFaves updates. UPDATE: See the comments section for reader updates with additional details and information on customer impact.

More than 4 inches of rain and gale-force winds battered the Seattle area yesterday, leading Gov. Christine Gregoire to declare a state of emergency. In Bothell, an eastern suburb of Seattle, flooding has closed major roadways [2] and led to the evacuation of many local businesses.

One poster on a blog discussing the outage identified himself as a T-Mobile employee and provided some detail on the situation at the company’s Bothell facility:
The report is correct – The main data center is flooded right now, so we only have email and our coverage/outage map. No accounts can be accessed due to the systems being out, so this can and will affect short codes such as 646, 225, the website and just about every system. It started around 7:30pm EST and was still happening when I left around 2:00 am EST. They were hoping to at least get read only systems online in the next few hours, so that we can at least do a little for the customers. Hopefully it will be back soon – Any techies have a clue how long it takes to dry out servers and get them back online – That should give a better idea on timelines.

For additional coverage of the storm’s impact, see coverage in the Seattle Times [3]. The area is home to many major data centers, but at present this is the only report we’ve seen of storm-related downtime.

About Rich Miller [4]

Rich Miller is the founder and editor-in-chief of Data Center Knowledge, and has been reporting on the data center sector since 2000. He has tracked the growing impact of high-density computing on the power and cooling of data centers, and the resulting push for improved energy efficiency in these facilities.

Article printed from Data Center Knowledge: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com

URL to article: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2007/12/04/rains-flood-seattle-t-mobile-data-center/

URLs in this post:

[1] flooded a T-Mobile data center: http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2007/12/04/t-mobile-down-due-to-flooding/

[2] closed major roadways: http://www.ci.bothell.wa.us/dept/CM/PIO/NewsEvents/releases/2007/120407Storm.html

[3] Seattle Times: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/home/index.html

[4] Rich Miller: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/author/richm/

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