New Jersey Data Center Outage Takes Down Services
A power outage at a key New Jersey data center on the afternoon of January 24 disrupted several state services, including its Labor Department, which processes unemployment claims. The power failure, which occurred at about 2 PM ET, shut down most of the state’s network, causing “disruptions across many state departments and agencies frequently used by the public,” the Treasury Department, which manages information technology for the state, wrote in a statement. Some departments lost access to e-mail, The Jersey Journal’s NJ.com reported on its Website. The disruption affected most of the state's computer network, including the nj.gov homepage and multiple offices from the state’s department of motor vehicles, which had to close an hour early Thursday when their computers went down, added the Associated Press. Treasury Department Spokesman William Quinn told NBCNewYork that power was restored late in the day, but that the data center wasn’t yet back online. Techs would work as late as necessary to restore services, but that members of the public with state business should check the state’s Web sites on Friday, January 25, presumably to see if they were operational. A message left with Quinn’s office Friday morning wasn’t returned by press time. As of 9:30 PM ET Thursday, the New Jersey Treasury Website hadn’t publicly noted the outage or provided a schedule to bring services back online. However, the Web pages of the Treasury, Department of Labor and Workforce Development—as well as the main nj.co homepage—appeared to be serving pages normally.