Incident Summary:
At approximately 5:35 a.m. on Friday, February 10, 2017, the University of Georgia experienced a power event that interrupted Georgia Power’s electrical feed to a portion of campus that included the UGA Boyd Data Center. The data center’s backup generator was engaged, but it failed several minutes later. The data center's uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) continued to provide power for approximately 30 minutes until their batteries were exhausted. The resulting loss of backup power impacted multiple systems, including ITS’ hosted instances of the GeorgiaVIEW Online Learning QPROD environment and SharePoint.

Georgia Power restored utility power to the data center by approximately 7:25 a.m. At this time, technical staff began bringing the affected systems back online. Due to a failure in the UPS environment, power wasn't immediately available to some of the systems including networking equipment required by the GeorgiaVIEW QPROD service and SharePoint. Service for USO SharePoint was restored at approximately 9:50 a.m. Service for QPROD was restored at approximately 11:00 a.m.

Because we recognize that interruptions of service impact institutions across the state, we are communicating this post-outage analysis of what occurred and the measures being taken to address the factors resulting in this incident.

Incident Cause:
The initial loss of power within the Boyd Data Center was caused by the failure of the data center's backup generator after the loss of Georgia Power utility power.

Incident Response Measures:
UGA and their generator support vendor are investigating the root cause of the generator's failure. Based on this research, UGA plans to take any appropriate steps necessary to increase the reliability of the generator. ITS is taking steps to improve the timeliness and quality of information communicated to our customers during events that impact the availability of our systems.