'Major incident' at Capita data centre: Multiple services still knackered

A major outage at a Capita data centre has knocked out multiple services for customers – including a number of councils' online services – for the last 36 hours.

Some of the sites affected include the NHS Business Services Authority, which apologised on its website for the continuing disruption and said it hoped its systems would be available by noon on Friday.

Sheffield City Council said on its website: "We’re aware an off-site power failure is causing problems for customers trying to contact us".

The issues first emerged at 22:30 on Wednesday, affecting Capita Pay360 customers. The outsourcer said that was due to a major incident at our data centre.

However, the impact appears to be much wider. One customer who asked not to be named said: "According to rumour, there was a power failure in West Malling and the generators failed, shutting the whole data centre down."

He added Capita has a virtualisation platform which hosts at least 30 clients and many internal Capita systems, and it still appears to be down. "They have probably had to fly parts in from out of the country as the infrastructure is so old," he said.

A Capita spokesman said: "Due to a technical fault in one of our data centres, some clients are experiencing some issues with the availability of their IT services. As soon as the fault occurred, remedial work commenced. Services are now being restored with many now available.

"The remainder of services are now being robustly tested to enable them to be running as usual shortly."

Capita remains the biggest provider of tech services and software to the British public sector: revenues swelled to £1.9bn in 2016, equating to a 50 per cent market share. ®