MTN is investigating the extent of damage suffered by its customers following the disruption of services at its Gallo Manor data centre last week.
The data centre was impacted by the ongoing power outages, which led to disruption of internet services to its customers, including Afrihost.
Afrihost notified clients of the disruption on Friday, saying: “Due to an extended load-shedding, there was cooling system failure at MTN’s Gallo Manor data centre where we host some of our web servers.
“This unfortunately damaged certain Afrihost hosting servers. We have successfully recovered 8% of the affected servers.”
The disruptions irked Afrihost clients, who took to various social media platforms to express their dismay over the incident.
Eskom’s negative impact on MTN’s data centre came in the same week the mobile operator announced a raft of measures to deal with the disruptive power outages.
MTN is burning more than 400 000 litres of fuel per month to maintain connectivity and provide decent customer experience.
The telco has also deployed over 2 000 generators to counter the impact of stage four (and higher) load-shedding and is exploring other solutions to the power crisis, including expedited rollout of batteries, generators and alternate power supplies.
Today, commenting on the disruption at the Gallo Manor data centre, Jacqui O’Sullivan, executive for corporate affairs at MTN SA, says the operator is “liaising with customers to investigate any impact on their operations”.
“MTN can confirm that one of its coolers at the Gallo Manor data centre was impacted following a power outage on Wednesday afternoon. However, the cooling system is redundant and therefore did not fully shut down and was in fact fully restored within 45 minutes.”
The electricity crisis has interrupted many businesses, including those in the telecoms sector, as Eskom continues to implement a crippling power cuts schedule.
The power utility yesterday announced various stages of load-shedding, which will be implemented throughout the week, with generation capacity shortages expected.
"As the generation capacity shortages persist over the next few weeks, load-shedding will continue to be implemented at various stages. Eskom cautions the public that it will still take a few weeks for the power generation system to fully recover to pre-strike levels," Eskom says.
Today, Eskom reported it currently has more than 21 000MW of energy unavailable due to planned maintenance and breakdowns.
“Depending on several possibilities, including the workforce fully returning to work to conduct much-needed repairs to equipment, it is anticipated that load-shedding will gradually be lowered to stage two by the weekend. Of course, Eskom will communicate and implement any changes as may be necessary.”
For Monday, stage four load-shedding will be implemented until 4pm, with stage six immediately following that until 10pm this evening.
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