- Texas floods cause 24 hour outage, which takes out inmates’ video conferencing service.
On May 29 as the Dallas, Texas area endured bad weather, floods took out Securus Technologies’ data centers – with the unusual result of cutting Texas prisoners off from their friends and family.
Securus Technologies is a for-profit data center operator serving the prison industry. When its data center in Dallas failed, this took out a video conferencing service, used by thousands of inmates in the Texas prison system instead of physical visits from friends and family, for nearly one day.
Securus shares a data center which provides electricity, heating, ventilation, and cooling to many carrier grade customers in a Dallas location. At 3,30am, the cooling failed, and Securus’ equipment heated to over 120°F, and the company had to take the extraordinary measure of shutting down all of its the data centers. Securus had no back-up plan. The result was that thousands of inmates of the Texas penal system were unable to communicate with friends or family for that day.
To get the system running again, Securus had to do the following:
- Replacement of switch/router/server electronic cards that cost over $1m;
- Hiring a private jet to deliver an emergency set of cards to Dallas from Oregon;
- Many Securus staff working 24 hours shifts;
- Securus staff contacting and updating 2,600 facilities during the outage;
- Rebooting thousands of pieces of kit, worth several hundred million dollars;
- Mobilizing 200 staff.
These are the unexpected events that we try to mitigate and prevent. Securing a simple system to monitor the server racks continuously, and critically alert when critical.. could assisted in immediate response , right when the cooling failed.
We hope to save the next one- Kentix US .
