Telecom services recovering from peak power outage in Mumbai

Mumbai: As Mumbai's power supply is restored in phases and emergency backups kick in, a majority of the services have started resuming. The unexpected power outage in Mumbai caught telecom infrastructure off guard, with around 10% towers likely impacted immediately after the power cut, according to industry sources.

The power supply failure was caused by "technical problems" during maintenance work, the energy minister of Maharashtra said in a video message. Power has now been restored to many areas of the city, officials and witnesses said.

Telecom subscribers took to social media to raise concerns about the lack of telecom and data services across the city and affected regions.

“The severe grid electricity outage in Mumbai and parts of Maharashtra today, impacted mobile networks in some areas. While all our critical sites and majority of the network has been working on back-up diesel generators, we expect full restoration as soon as the power grid is fully functional. We regret any inconvenience caused to our customers,” said a statement from telecom operator Vodafone Idea, following queries regarding service impact today.

With over 90% employees across tech companies working from home due to the pandemic, the Mumbai power outage is likely to impact businesses across the information technology, banking and financial services and fintech sectors.

Mint has reached out to telecom service providers, IT and data centre companies for assessments on the extent of impact on their services. Mumbai is home to major tech companies like Tata Consultancy Services, Tech Mahindra, Accenture and Capgemini, apart from having the largest concentration of data centre facilities in the country. Between Mumbai and Navi Mumbai region, a majority of the country's top data centre businesses are located that host services for companies across the country. Mumbai holds over 40% of total data centre capacity in the country.

“The unprecedented power outage witnessed in Mumbai today didn’t affect operations at Yotta NM1 Datacenter since incidents like these are factored in our tier IV design. At 10.04am when the power outage occurred from utility side, our diesel generators kicked-in automatically and started powering the server racks as well as our chiller/cooling system and all other support loads," said Sunil Gupta, CEO and managing partner, Yotta Infrastructure.

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 localized power cuts across the city.