De Novo has explained the reasons behind a recent incident that marked the first power outage in nearly 15 years, leaving their Kyiv data center without electricity for 14 minutes. This caused significant disruptions to services like "Diia," "Nova Poshta," and banking terminals.
Journalists visited the data center in Kyiv to gather insights directly from the company's management regarding the incident.
De Novo serves over 150 clients, including major players such as "Oschadbank," "Raiffeisen Bank," and "Nova Poshta." Approximately 70% of their clients utilize cloud services, while the remaining 30% host their own equipment within the data center.
On April 26, it was reported that the outage was not due to a cyberattack. The company identified the issue as arising from a problem during the final stage of replacing the uninterruptible power supply.
To ensure continuous power, engineers implemented a temporary power bridge. However, at 8:03 AM, when the switch was turned off as planned, it failed to operate completely due to a mechanical defect.
When power was fed through both the new line and the bridge simultaneously, the automation system interpreted this as a serious error and shut down the system to prevent an accident.
Power was restored within 14 minutes, but due to the complexity of the systems, full restoration of De Novo's cloud infrastructure took until 9:45 AM, while some client IT systems continued to recover for several more hours. By 1 PM, all effects of the incident had been resolved.
CEO Maxim Ageev explained that it was nearly impossible to foresee such a situation since the switch did not engage as required, even though the indicators showed that everything was normal.
"In over 5000 days of operation since November 2010, this is the first downtime lasting 15 minutes. Our contracts allow for up to 96 minutes of downtime per year, and we aim to maintain service without interruptions, so this incident will not lead to a review of agreements," Ageev emphasized.
Engineers from Schneider Electric, the manufacturer of the energy equipment at the data center, quickly arrived at the scene. The chief engineer of the data center, Oleksandr Yurchenko, added that the faulty switch had been in service since 2018.