DAILYHOSTNEWS, January 09, 2012 – A fire broke out at a Mumbai-area data center of the Indian telecommunications company Airtel in late December creating a network outage and disrupting mobile services for many of the company’s customers for several hours, Indian newspaper The Economic Times reported.
The fire in the company’s data center in Malad, a Mumbai suburb, led to shutdown of servers used to route calls in the region. It was reportedly caused by a short circuit.
The data center is a central point of presence for the company’s Western region, which includes Mumbai, Maharashtra, Goa, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Gujarat.
On the day of the outage, Airtel released a statement, saying, “There was a network outage in the Western region this morning as a result of a fire in our central POP (point of presence) location in Malad, Mumbai. Our teams have been working since morning to normalize all affected services.”
According to the report, the company’s data services – and especially data services to many corporate customers in the region – were hit hardest.
About 17% of Airtel’s entire customer base is located in the affected region. Chhattisgarh and Gujarat were the only two states in the Western region that were not affected by the outage.
Airtel has faced a similar incident in the past. The Economic Times reports that in 2008, a short circuit at another one of the company’s Mumbai-area data centers had let to a large fire, causing an outage that lasted more than 12 hours.
