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Extreme Heat Knocks Out Internet In Australia
An anonymous reader writes with news that bad weather caused internet connectivity problems for users in Perth, Western Australia on Monday. But it wasn't raging storms or lightning that caused this outage — it was extreme heat. Monday was the 6th hottest day on record for Perth, peaking around 44.4 C (111.9 F).
Thousands of iiNet customers across Australia found themselves offline for about six and a half hours after the company shut down some of its systems at its Perth data center at about 4.30pm AEDST because of record breaking-temperatures. ... "[W]e shut down our servers as a precautionary measure," an iiNet spokesman said late Monday night. "Although redundancy plans ensured over 98 per cent of customers remained unaffected, some customers experienced issues reconnecting to the internet." ... Users in Western Australia, NSW, Victoria and South Australia took to Twitter, Facebook and broadband forum Whirlpool to post their frustrations to the country's second largest DSL internet service provider.
Yes, many people were affected, but iiNet is not 'the internet'. All the other big providers were still running just fine.
You could post the same headline every time someone's modem cable gets knocked out or their router crashes.
they had multiple failures. The primary air con failed, and so did the backups
http://blog.iinet.net.au/statement-chief-technology-officer-mark-dioguardi/
http://blog.iinet.net.au/statement-chief-technology-officer-mark-dioguardi/
Basically both main and backup aircon went down.
Sigh... first world problems. Few services were shutdown for precaution as result of A/C failure (primary/backup).
Hi All,
Due to heat in Perth we have lost a number of services and precautionary shut others down.
Customer will notice impact to the following services:
- iiNet Toolbox and Westnet MyAccount [RESTORED 7:00PM WST]
- Westnet Email [RESTORED 7:45PM WST]
- Westnet Hosted Websites [RESTORED 9:00PM WST]
- iiNet hosted email [RESTORED 7:45PM WST]
- iiNet/Westnet/Adam/Netspace Webmail [RESTORED 7:00PM WST]
- Customers may be unable to re-authenticate after disconnecting from the internet [RESTORED 8:00PM WST]
A number of internal tools are also affected, which will impact our ability to respond to certain customer enquiries.
Update 6pm WST: Due to issues with staff access, some contact centre queues have been closed. Affected queues will be reopened once the incident has been resolved.
Update 8pm WST: Most services have been restored, Engineers are continuing to review all services impacted by the incident. Customers that were off-line are recommended to perform a modem power-cycle to get back on-line.
Thanks,
Basically few gen Y's screaming that they can't post their sweaty selfies for a few hours.
Depending on the refrigerant used it is possible that the condenser temperature (the bit exposed to the outside air) exceeded the critical point of the gas at which point it is impossible to tell the difference between liquid or gas. The trouble is phase change cooling works best (most efficient) the closer to the critical point you can go but not past it.
The second problem is the condenser pressure would increase with increasing ambient air temperature. In the past this was enough to stall the compressor motors on a hot day.
My guess is they went for a system with a high efficiency that should work for 99.9% of the time, that last 0.1% is the 8 hours of the year when the temperature is above 42'C (normally for Perth it is normally only an hours before the sea breeze kicks in and drops the temperature by at least 5'C). This time the temperature went up and stayed up for a period of time.
Perth is very remote. sure it's the state capital, but once you're out of the metropolitan area it's a thousand kilometers to anywhere else.
SJW n. One who posts facts.