Equinix Outage Means Downtime for Zoho update from January 2012

A power outage Friday morning in an Equinix data center in California caused problems for a number of customers, most notably Zoho, which experienced hours of downtime for several of its web-based office applications. Equinix acknowledged the incident, but did not provide details on the cause of the outage at its SV4 facility in Silicon Valley.

"This morning, an Equinix data center experienced a power failure that affected a number of customers, including Zoho," Equinix said in a statement. "We immediately notified the affected customers and full service was restored within a matter of seconds. We are investigating the root cause of the issue. We deeply regret the impact and inconvenience this incident caused our customers."

Although power to the data center was restored within seconds, the sudden loss of power is problematic for database-driven applications, which means that short power outages can translate into hours of recovery time for services. That was the case for Zoho.

"Services have multiple database clusters – like 8-12 database clusters per each service," Zoho explained in a blog post. "(The) power failure caused inconsistencies in some of these clusters. To restore these services fully, we need to make sure all these database clusters are consistent. This database consistency check and sync is what is taking time."

Zoho reported the outage at 8:46 am Eastern, and began restoring services by 1:30 pm. As of 4:30 pm, the majority of services appeared to be back online. The company's applications have more than 5 million users.