7 Service Providers Slammed By Superstorm Sandy

Water In The Basement

Internet infrastructure providers in the New York City area scrambled this week to cope with the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy.

As utilities shut off power and water inundated lower floors and knocked out equipment, these providers turned to backup generators for power. Several facilities were damaged, but for the most part, they worked around the issues, rerouted traffic and used whatever tools were available to keep things running.

Thus far, few service disruptions have been reported.

Continue on and see how the providers are faring.

Verizon Communications

Flooding swept through several Verizon facilities throughout New York, damaging backup power equipment, including generators and fuel pumps, even as the company was being called on to help customers throughout the region.

"Verizon has spent the past 24 hours pumping water out of the buildings while at the same time the company brought in large portable generators to power the buildings and begin restoring services to customers," the company said Wednesday.

The company said its communications equipment, such as voice switches, data equipment and routers are located on higher floors in these facilities as designed and have not been damaged.

Datagram

Web hosting company Datagram lost power in its New York facility Monday, taking with it the Huffington Post, Gawker and BuzzFeed websites that it hosted.

The company remained down Wednesday, and it posted a bleak update.

"Still no word from ConEd on status of electrical switch systems. We hope to have an update soon," the company said. "No one in the area is allowed to energize without ConEd sign off. There are countless ConEd personnel in the area, trucks on the sidewalks, and double parked in the street. ConEd and all of the contract workers downtown are the true heroes of Hurricane Sandy."

Level 3 Communications

Level 3 said it experienced no major outages and is working to bring back service where it is down.

"To this point, we have experienced no major service disruption," the company said on its blog. "There have been a few isolated incidents affecting a small number of customers, and we are resolving these as quickly as possible. Of course, being mindful of the safety of our employees and as we are also cooperating with government closures in the area, our network repair response times may be delayed."

Peer 1

Generators at Peer 1 locations were knocked out, creating power shortages and forcing staff to scramble to maintain and keep services.

Wednesday morning, the company took down power at one of its sites, but most customers retained services as the company worked to stabilize operations.

"Peer1 is still maintaining generator power for most customers in Site 2 and Site 1," the company said on its blog. "The temperature in Site 1 is still running at a critically high level. At this point, we have started to call all clients in our site 1 and are asking all our colocate clients to turn down non-essential equipment. This will maximize our time to run on Generator and help with the temperature rise in site 1. Our technicians will go ahead and shutdown all customers at Site 1 within the next hour."

Telx

The global data center and colocation provider Telx kept services running on generators but closed its New York Headquarters Wednesday.

An alert on Telx's website read as follows:

"NYC1 - 10:45 10/31 NOW ON GENERATOR POWER, AT CURRENT FUEL CONSUMPTION RATE WE HAVE AMPLE FUEL, A NEW FUEL DELIVERY IS SCHEDULED FOR MIDDAY EACH DAY, FUEL RESERVES ARE STAGED ON THE ISLAND. OPERATING TEMPS ARE WITHIN RANGE."

Internap Network Services

Flooding caused a temporary loss of power for cloud services and colocation provider Internap, the company said Wednesday.

"At our 111 8th data center, we experienced an outage last night due to building-fed fuel system malfunctioning. When the issue occurred, the fuel pumps could not provide diesel to the rooftop generators, causing them to stop supplying power to our UPS system. Once battery backup was exhausted, our infrastructure lost power," the company said in a blog.

"The incident caused a loss of IP connectivity for several service points until power to our P-NAP was restored. At this point, we have connectivity restored for all customers and power restored to the majority of our data center customers. We continue to work with vendors to bring the entire site back online."

Equinix

Data center and Internet exchange provider Equinix used generators to maintain power during the outage cause by flooding, with some temporary loss of service.

"NY9 experienced a failed generator that impacted service to several customers. We made repairs and service was returned this morning. The site remains on generator power," Equinix said in a blog Tuesday evening.