Power was lost to the Portland State University data center in the Fourth Avenue Building early yesterday afternoon and remained off for 45 minutes to an hour. All technical systems were knocked offline and most remained inaccessible at press time. Services affected by the outage include campus e-mail, BlackBoard, the Portland State Web site and Banweb.
Black Tuesday
Power was lost to the Portland State University data center in the Fourth Avenue Building early yesterday afternoon and remained off for 45 minutes to an hour. All technical systems were knocked offline and most remained inaccessible at press time. Services affected by the outage include campus e-mail, BlackBoard, the Portland State Web site and Banweb.
Though the cause of the outage has not been released by the Office of Information Technologies, there is speculation that a generator and a battery—which work as backup power systems—failed to keep power running to servers, which resulted in a hard shutdown.
A hard shutdown is the loss of power to a computer, which prevents the equipment from undergoing system checks. This can potentially result in data loss.
The Fourth Avenue Building is powered by two substations, which transfer higher voltage to a lower voltage output that is more appropriate for buildings. There are also alternate power sources, which are tested monthly, built in to prevent complete outages.
In 2007, just after the data center was moved to the Fourth Avenue Building, a massive power outage occurred which resulted in the loss of e-mail data.
