IT service outage

Around midday on Tuesday 20 November there was a serious failure of UCL's IT systems.

The problem was caused by water leaking into the data centre located in Wolfson House from a fractured pipe elsewhere in the building. The leak caused a critical power switch to fail which resulted in a large number of systems shutting down. 

Information Services Division (ISD) initiated a critical incident management process to monitor the event and carry out the necessary actions to minimise disruption and bring services back on line as soon as possible. Failover procedures were initiated and most services were brought back online later the same afternoon. There was some disruption to administrative systems into the following day but all services have now been re-established.

The critical incident team are reviewing how this incident was handled and in particular are looking at how communications can be improved.  Thank you for your patience during this time.

For your information ISD uses the website www.ucl-status.ac.uk (an externally hosted site) to keep users informed of system problems when UCL's own website goes down. Other ISD status information is shown on the ISD Service news pages.

Chris Moos, ISD Website and Communications Team Leader, IT Change and Project Delivery, UCL Information Services Division