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Fire Takes Azerbaijan Offline (datacenterdynamics.com)

Posted by timothy on from the right-the-whole-place dept.

judgecorp writes: On Monday, 90 percent of Azerbaijan lost Internet access, due to a fire at one data center in Baku, the capital of the former Soviet Republic. Cables caught fire at the Delta Telecom facility, and international providers including NTT and Telecom Italia all lost service for nearly eight hours. Some interesting snippets: Azerbaijan is a former Soviet republic that has seen rapid development thanks to its rich oil and gas reserves. The country has been running several projects aimed at modernizing its communications infrastructure, including participation in Trans-Eurasian Information Highway (TASIM). ... At about 16:10 on Monday, consumers, businesses and government agencies across Azerbaijan suddenly lost their connections to the Internet. Banks couldn’t make domestic money transfers, and even Point-of-Sale terminals were not working. ... Interestingly, no international traffic flowing though Azerbaijan was affected by the outage. “Transmission channels to Georgia, Iran, and the Middle East were working at full capacity,” Iltimas Mammadov, the minister of communications, told AzerNews.

3 of 57 comments (clear)

  1. Goes through one spot for a reason by rahvin112 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The entire countries internet goes through a single building for a reason and it's not cost. They've not forgot their KGB roots.

    1. Re:Goes through one spot for a reason by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      It is because of cost. The US has more sites and the monitoring works just fine. China is probably the same.
      Not that there's anything wrong with keeping costs down. I don't know Azerbaijan, but maybe 99,9999% uptime is not their top priority.

  2. Re:95% muslim country can't keep basic infrastruct by unixisc · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I am the first person to criticize Muslims, but people of the ex Soviet Republics are just nominal Muslims - nothing like the Quran thumpers that you'll find in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Palestinian Authority, Syria, Egypt, Iraq or Iran. In fact, most of them also recognize Israel and have full diplomatic relations w/ Israel - something that's unthinkable for most Muslim countries.

    Also, while I'm no fan of Communism either, that's the one thing that has kept the stans - particularly Uzbekistan - from becoming an Islamic regime like Afghanistan.