[DAILYHOSTNEWS] July,30 2012, Most parts of north India rolled under severe power blackout today, due to collapse of the northern electricity transmission grid early in the morning. Power failure left 350 million people in 7 states without power and disrupting many services. Major services that are hit by the blackout are :
- Delhi metro service
- Railway services
- Hospital services
- IT sector services
- Aviation services
“The fault is not known as yet. Somewhere near Agra, a failure has happened. We will inquire that,” Power Minister Sushilkumar Shinde said.
IT sector most significant services i.e. Data Centers were also affected by this blackout. As the Data Centers were made to run on power backups to maintain the centers working lively, power failures can cause an irrecoverable loss of thousands of records stored over the years and disrupt ongoing transactions which could prove out to be a serious loss for the organization. The downtime of the servers used in the data centers could also take many hours to work back efficiently which causes problems for the end customers as well .
On this blackout Avinash Arora, Director ICT (India and S.E. Asia), New Holland Fiat India stated “The cross power systems were up in a fraction of seconds, The company runs agricultural manufacturing plants across North India. We have captive power generation for our plants. We have a 40 kva UPS that has ensured that out data centers and communications are running normally. Our setup can function for 7-8 days with no power.”
Another statement came from the side of Sunil Sirohi, Vice President, NIIT as he stated “We automatically switched to our diesel genset -powered backup systems. These systems can run for days. We are just worried about our employees getting to work since public transport has been disrupted due to the metro shut down. We’ve had many power shut down like this before but nothing of this scale.”
Apart from the IT sector, people faced problems in travelling too as the modes of transports were also affected like Delhi Metro which is the mode of transport for 17 lakhs people daily .Many hospitals were also affected by this failure.Until now 50 % of the power has been restored.
