THE ESB HAS said that a transformer failure, and not a lightning strike caused a power cut which knocked out supply to 100 customers in CityWest, including one of Amazon’s data centres on Sunday.

Silicon Republic reports that the ESB has ruled out lightning as the cause, even though Amazon had said that lightning had caused an explosion at the CityWest substation.

ESB staff had initally thought that lightning was the reason for the outage, but the company has now said that a transformer failed.

Data centres belonging to Amazon were among those affected. Silicon Republic reports that some Amazon customers were disrupted for up to 48 hours.

It’s also reported that Amazon placed a connection between the ‘explosion’ and the failure of its own backup generators.

Centres owned by BT were also hit, though in those cases back-up systems kicked in immediately and ensured no impact for customers.

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