Datacenters Near Heathrow Seemingly Stay Up As Substation Fire Closes Airport

London’s Heathrow Airport will close on Friday after a fire in an electricity substation it relies on caused a power outage - but nearby datacenters seem to be unaffected.

“Due to a fire at an electrical substation supplying the airport, Heathrow is experiencing a significant power outage,” states a popup message on the airport’s website. “To maintain the safety of our passengers and colleagues, Heathrow will be closed until 23:59 on 21 March.”

The London Fire Brigade has reports it was called about the fire at 11:23 PM on Thursday and sent ten fire engines and around 70 firefighters to the fire on Nestles Avenue in Hayes.

"The fire has caused a power outage affecting a large number of homes and local businesses, and we are working closely with our partners to minimise disruption,” said Assistant Commissioner Pat Goulbourne.

“This will be a prolonged incident, with crews remaining on scene throughout the night. As we head into the morning, disruption is expected to increase, and we urge people to avoid the area wherever possible,” Goulbourne added.

Several datacenters are located near the airport and could therefore also rely on the same substation, but at the time of writing The Register has not seen evidence they’re impacted by fire. Status pages for AWS, Rackspace, Digital Realty, Virtus, and Colt all report no outages.

However we note this story is being prepared at 04:30 London time, and the impact of any issues may not yet be apparent. Or perhaps datacenter operators’ resilience rigs have kicked in as expected – and can last another 20 hours or more given Heathrow expects a full-day outage. Datacenters typically use batteries, flywheels, and diesel generators to provide emergency power, and many can run for days without power flowing in from the grid.

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Heathrow typically handles over 1,000 aircraft movements on most days, and plenty of those involve planes that are already in the air. We’ve seen reports of some arranging alternative destinations, and others being turned around mid-air.

Significant disruptions are expected.

Questions will doubtless be asked about why Heathrow doesn’t possess sufficient generation capacity to cover an event of this sort – like datacenters do.

This is a developing story and we will update it if datacenters start to dim. ®