ABOVE: Emergency services attend Sky City following smoke (Photo: Ben Gracewood.) Smoke at Sky City which prompted a call to the fire brigade was apparently responsible for an outage suffered by Vodafone's network this afternoon. Via Geekzone, cust
ABOVE: Emergency services attend Sky City following smoke (Photo: Ben Gracewood.)
Smoke at Sky City which prompted a call to the fire brigade was apparently responsible for an outage suffered by Vodafone's network this afternoon.
Via Geekzone, customers began to complain about widespread Vodafone network outages shortly after 2pm.
Asked to explain the outages, a Vodafone spokesman pointed to the incident, which was reportedly caused by a power surge.
Some was seen coming from a room housing a generator on the Federal Street side of Sky City, leading to a partial evacuation.
All 3G mobile data and most fixed line broadband services were taken offline, nationwide, Vodafone head of corporate communications Paul Brislen told NBR. For a time, Vodafone's own website was down.
Mr Brislen said the outage hit at 1.40pm, with most service restored by 2.40pm.
A number of other providers, including Kordia and Iconz, saw service disrupted for the same period, according to Vodafone (other affected companies have yet to comment).
A bulletin posted to the New Zealand Network Operators Group (NZOG), a forum for telecommunications and ISP staff, forwarded this update to its members as the outage hit:
"Customers please note that we have been notified that due to a fire in the comms room of SkyTower, the fire brigade have locked down all access to the building and we are unable to gain access.
"All power to the building is currently off. We have an engineer ready to proceed into the building to check all services. Currently our equipment is running on UPS and our supplier's equipment is also running on UPS [uninteruptable power supply]."
Sky City executive Peter Treacy told NBR there was no fire but that smoke in a plant room on the ground floor of the main casino site prompted a precautionary call to the fire brigade.
Too vulnerable?
At 2.50pm, a staffer at one ISP told NBR that the situation seemed contained, and that the internet service providers who share wireless transmission facilities at the Sky Tower were being "patched back in."
The insider continued: "Level 48 on the Sky Tower is key to all of the New Zealand networks; where all ISPs share traffic.
"Let's just say that if someone nukes the Sky Tower, we'd all be pretty stuffed for a few days.
"It will definitely be a wakeup call for people using the Sky Tower as their main source of connection."
Today's Sky City incident definitely hit one service provider hardest.
Vodafone building new backup system
"Ironically we're in the throes of building redundancy through [Telecom's] Mayoral Drive, [exchange]" Mr Brislen told NBR shortly after the incident.
A "redundant" system can take over when a main system stops.
Mr Brislen said that in the event of a power failure, staff in the Sky Tower shared facility would manually turn on a back-up power system.
But because of the smoke, the building was shut down and evacuated as a precaution before Vodafone's backup system kicked in. The Sky Tower and the Sky City Hotel were not affected or evacuated but around 200 staff from the main gaming floor, bars and restaurants were evacuated.
Fire personnel requested Sky City keep the back-up power system shut down while they investigated.
Sky City have external technicians on site currently but Mr Treacy said it could be 24 hours before they know what caused the smoke.
The new Mayoral Drive fail-over facility was a separate project from Vodafone's storage area network (SAN) upgrade, which will address recent email and website hosting proble
