Outage at Minneapolis data center behind last week's telecommunications disruptions
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A power failure at a downtown Minneapolis data center called the 511 Building is likely behind disruptions to several government services last week.
The Midwest Internet Cooperative Exchange is housed in the facility and confirmed the outage to MPR News. Its partners include some of the public-sector networks that were affected, including Dakota County 911.
Some voting machines also lost internet connectivity, and state agency websites were affected. It's unclear if the same outage is behind the pause in flights at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport that same day.
Metro State University cybersecurity expert Faisal Kaleem said the data center is a crucial connection point.
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“Think of the internet as a physical highway system, and the 511 Building in downtown is the largest, most critical highway intersection in the upper Midwest,” Kaleem said.
The building is what’s called a “carrier hotel,” where telephone and internet networks connect to one another, allowing customers on different networks to also connect to one another.
Here’s how telecommunications expert Eric Lampland described it to MPR News in 2012, when the data center property was being considered for U.S. Bank Stadium:
"You have an iPhone, and you're therefore on one of three possible carriers — AT&T, Verizon or Sprint," Lampland said. "I happen to be a T-Mobile person. So, if we're going to make a call between us, we have to have some place to come together, to make that traffic transfer from your carrier to my carrier."
It’s unclear what caused Thursday’s outage. Cologix operates the data center and has not responded to requests for comment. As of Friday, the Midwest Internet Cooperative Exchange said it had not yet been told a reason for the hour-and-a-half outage, which also affected back up power.
Kaleem said the back up power also going down is concerning.
“That building is supposed to be 24/7 online, regardless of catastrophe or anything,” he said.
Xcel Energy said the outage wasn’t a problem with the utility.
Risikat Adesaogun, director of communications for Minnesota IT Services, declined to name the location of the outage as a safety precaution, but said there is no indication it was related to a cybersecurity incident, like the one that disrupted municipal water systems in Minnesota.
Listen to the full conversation with Kaleem by clicking the player above.
