Over the last weekend in August, Amtrak, the operating name of US The National Railroad Passenger Corporation, suffered a major national shutdown in its reservations and ticketing systems.
Initial unconfirmed reports indicated that a mainframe facility in Manassas, Virginia, which houses the majority of Amtrak's servers, had been hit by a lightning bolt. Other sources suggested that a new software installation on servers had triggered the failure. However, Karina Romero, an Amtrak spokesperson, confirmed that the shutdown was related to a power failure at Manassas facility.
"There are three circuit breakers and one failed. All three must be active in order for them to work. As a result, all connectivity with the Manassas data facility was severed, Romero added.
Amtrak has also provided a company-wide memo:
"At 7:11 a.m. EDT on Saturday, Aug. 25, the Manassas Data Center building experienced a failure on one of the three major power distribution panels providing electrical power to the data center (each panel is capable of supporting twice the current utilized capacity of the data center). Key network components and many application servers were lost as a result of the power outage, however, the mainframes and other components remained available, but without network connectivity. All Revenue and Business systems were brought down and a replacement panel was located and shipped from Connecticut overnight. An additional panel was located in Texas and airshipped overnight to the data center to provide spare capacity. Revenue systems were brought back online starting at 1 p.m. EDT on Sunday. Recovery of business systems continues with identification of non-essential batch, resolution of minor outstanding issues and prioritization of remaining batch applications to recover all production business applications.