Early on Friday (Oct 10) a power outage hit the Novell office and data center in Nürnberg, Germany, effectively taking down several services used by the popular Linux distribution OpenSUSE, including the download redirector (used for downloads and software updates if we understand it correctly) and the mailing lists.
Though the building had two power lines, both failed, and the power company had to dig up the cables to repair them.
Photos by Marko Jung. More pictures can be found here and here.
Power wasn’t restored until late Friday night (or extremely early on Saturday, depending on how you look at it…)
The most critical OpenSUSE services were back online on Saturday morning, though some were offline until Saturday evening. This means that the service outage for OpenSUSE lasted close to 24 hours.
Throughout the outage, Novell kept the community up to date on the OpenSUSE News website, which is hosted at a different data center and therefore wasn’t affected by the outage.
(We have referred to the local time in Germany throughout this post, i.e. CEST.)
