Incident Summary
At approximately 12:30 a.m. on Friday, April 21, 2017, 79 locations in the Georgia Department of Education K-12 Network lost internet connectivity due to an outage at the Digital Realty Data Center in Atlanta. Diagnosis and repairs began immediately, with internet connectivity being restored to the majority of affected locations by 11:45 a.m. that same morning. By approximately 1:30 p.m., only five DOE sites were still affected. By approximately 11:00 a.m. on Saturday, April 22, 2017, the last affected DOE location was brought back online.
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
An AT&T equipment failure caused a power outage at the Digital Realty’s Data Center (56 Marietta Street) in downtown Atlanta, where multiple network providers such as AT&T, Google, Sprint, etc. co-locate to connect with each other. Because ITS contracts with AT&T to provide network circuits to individual DOE school districts, the PeachNet DOE circuits housed at the facility were affected by the power outage.
Incident Response
AT&T is investigating the root cause of the equipment failure and continues to repair and replace equipment affected by the outage. Once these activities are complete, AT&T will take appropriate steps necessary to increase the reliability of their services. ITS is taking steps to improve the timeliness and quality of information communicated to DOE K-12 customers during events that impact their network connectivity.