Centrelink suffered a power outage to a datacentre in Canberra last Friday morning that crippled phone, web and face to face services nationwide, with staff at at least one Canberra branch being sent home without receiving the full picture about what had happened.

“Our call centres and online services have been most significantly affected by this outage,” confirmed Centrelink general manager, Hank Jongen in a statement issued on Friday. “So if customers need to speak with Centrelink urgently they should visit an office.”

Centrelink offices were kept open on Friday to handle basic enquiries and those customers who did not have an urgent matter to be addressed were urged to wait until this week before contacting Centrelink. “Customers have been inconvenienced by the length of the disruption, and for that we apologise,” Jongen said.

“We have put contingency plans in place, and want to reassure our customers that we are doing everything possible to ensure their payments will not be delayed as a result of today’s disruption to services. ”

The power outage to the datacentre and the 21 minute blackout in Tuggeranong Valley was caused by a fault at a substation — a responsibility of ACT’s power company ActewAGL — in Canberra suburb Wannisassa.

A Centrelink spokeswoman said in an emailed response to questions: “We approached ActewAGL for some background on the power outage, and were told electricity to areas of the Tuggeranong Valley was interrupted for 21 minutes between 9.07am and 9.28am on Friday morning. This interruption was caused by a fault at the Wannisassa substation.”

An ActewAGL spokeswoman was contacted by Delimiter today who issued the above statement and said further information to the cause of the fault was yet to be received at the time of writing the article. Normal Centrelink services were expected to be back to normal for Western Australia yesterday and the rest the nation were expected to resume services today.

Image credit: Andrea Kratzenberg, royalty free

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1. Me
   Posted 15/06/2010 at 1:14 pm | Permalink | Reply

   “The power outage to the datacentre and the 21 minute blackout in Tuggeranong Valley was caused by a fault at a substation…”

   This seems to be the same excuse that Ravi from Primus uses each time one of their DCs goes dark.

   These kind of statements are so ridiculous that they border on absurd.

   If there is no genset backup that has been tested and shown to be working, then it’s not a Data Centre, it’s just a room.

   • Renai LeMay
     Posted 15/06/2010 at 1:30 pm | Permalink | Reply

     No kidding, something like this is a joke. Most datacentres would handle this kind of outage without a problem — the generators would keep them going for at least 24 hours, even if they didn’t have redundant power coming in. I can’t imagine what Centrelink is doing down in Canberra but this certainly exposes how much they need to upgrade their infrastructure.