Tamworth businesses in the dark over power outage


A power cut hit around 1500 commercial and residential properties in the Two Gates area of Tamworth, leaving them without electricity for over two hours on Thursday (February 19). It is believed a faulty underground cable caused the problem, but as yet no details have been released by Western Power Distribution, who began dealing with the fault around 5.30pm.

Although the impact on businesses in the area was reduced by the time of the incident, a sudden loss of power can cause severe problems for businesses as systems go off line and production processes are stalled.

Information technology service provider Quiss Technology, is one business more than prepared, explains Managing Director Andy Michael: “A power outage on this scale can have serious consequences for businesses, with IT systems shut-off without warning often at risk of developing problems on re-start, regardless of lost data issues.

“We are prepared for these eventualities and within milliseconds of the blackout striking, we had automatically switched from the mains supply to our uninterruptible power source, which keeps everything running until the generator kicks in, minutes later.

“Everything on our site is ‘highly available’ and fully automated to ensure our server centre is not impacted and our service to thousands of hosted users, none of whom were aware of the disaster unfolding in Two Gates, was unaffected.

“They were able to continue working from anywhere, using any device, via our hosted infrastructure which delivers a robust, reliable, always-on service; their systems continue to run, data is uninterrupted and our helpdesk remains available.

“Businesses are now more reliant on technology than ever before and power outages like this, which have increased in regularity across the country in the past 12 months serve as a reminder to how fragile systems are if they do not have the necessary back up power.

“Just a two hour problem like this might be okay for a lot of businesses with laptops and allow an organised shut down, but any longer and problems could be magnified. It’s worth businesses reviewing their disaster recovery plans or getting one sorted.”

Western Power Distribution had almost everyone back on within two hours and as soon as supplies were restored the generator automatically detects the newly stabilised connection and shuts down enabling power to be accessed from the restored grid once again.

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