Mumbai power outage: WFH likely to be impacted due to disruption

With over 90% employees across tech companies working from home amid the covid-19 outbreak, the massive power outage in India's financial capital caused by a grid failure on Monday is likely to impact businesses across the information technology, banking and financial services and fintech sectors.

Mumbai, which is home to major tech companies like Tata Consultancy Services, Tech Mahindra, Accenture, Capgemini, also has the largest concentration of data centre facilities -- about 40% -- in the country.

Between Mumbai and Navi Mumbai region, a majority of top data centre businesses are located which host services for companies across the country.

Mint has reached out to telecom service providers as well and IT and data centre companies for assessments on the extent of impact on their services. According to sources in the telecom industry over 1200 tower cites across the country have been impacted due to the outage.

"Power cut across the Mumbai Metropolitan Region due to grid failure," the Brihanmumbai Electric Supply and Transport agency said on Twitter. Stock exchanges continued to function normally. BSE also carried out the listing ceremony for Mazagon Shipbuilders in the morning, the exchange spokesperson said. Some rail services were halted due to the power outage, according to a tweet by the Central Railway.

As per updates shared by the data centre providers prior to cyclone Nisarga in June, these establishments have up to 48 hours of power backup. The bigger concern will be for employees who are using residential data services which will be impacted due to localised power cuts across the city.