Outage Archives — Business Bells

Business Bells

Tag: Outage

  • It’s 8-Week Outage, Not Blackout, Says Ikeja Electric

    It’s 8-Week Outage, Not Blackout, Says Ikeja Electric

     

    Ikeja Electric Plc has said its customers need not to panic as the upgrade of the 132kv lines embarked upon by the Transmission Company of Nigeria, TCN would not result into total blackout as the power outage would only be between 8am and 6pm for the eight-week period.  

     

    Head of Corporate Communications, Ikeja Electric, Felix Ofulue, while making the clarification, told Business Bells that the earlier report of blackout is a misinformation by some online blogs.

     

    According to Ofulue, “It is not a blackout. Blackout don’t happen in the afternoon. The outage is between 8am – 6pm. In the evening power supply will be restored to customers between 6pm and 8am.”

     

    Olajide Kumapayi, chief technical officer of the electricity distribution company (DisCo), had announced that the project will begin on October 11.

    It’s 8-Week Outage, Not Blackout, Says Ikeja Electric

    The areas to be affected include Oregun, Police Training College, Oba Akran, Oke Ira, Ogba, Magodo, Anifowoshe and Omole Phase One.

     

    He noted that the outage became necessary because some of the 132Kv lines installed over 50 years ago had become obsolete and degraded due to time and usage.

     

    “The TCN is currently embarking on the upgrade of the 132KV lines from Ikeja West to Ota and Alimosho in stages. This is the second stage.

     

    “We will replace all the aluminium conductors with gap conductors which is more sophisticated to withstand heat and has more capacity to carry current.

     

    “The implication of this is that from 8am to 6pm every day, the substations controlling these areas will be switched off which will affect the feeders connected to them,” Kumapayi said.

     

    Also, Maximum Demand (MD) customers such as Ikeja City Mall, Police College, Lagos State University Teaching Hospital and the Ikeja High Court will be affected by the project.

     

    The chief technical officer disclosed that the TCN will also move to Alimosho and Agege axis in the next stage.

  • Zuckerberg Loses $7bn in Hours As Facebook Suffers Outage   –Report

    Zuckerberg Loses $7bn in Hours As Facebook Suffers Outage   –Report

     

    Silicon Valley techpreneur Mark Zuckerberg’s personal wealth has fallen by nearly $7 billion in a few hours, knocking him down a notch on the list of the world’s richest people, after a whistleblower came forward and outages took Facebook Inc.’s flagship products offline, Bloomberg reports.

     

     Since 04:25pm on Monday, users visiting Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp have been confronted with error messages.

     

    At least over three billion online users are frustrated and unable to connect all over the world due to the shutdown.

     

    Chief Technology Officer at Facebook, Mike Schroepfe, tweeted, “Sincere apologies to everyone impacted by outages of Facebook powered services right now. We are experiencing networking issues and teams are working as fast as possible to debug and restore as fast as possible.”

     

    According to Bloomberg, a selloff sent the social-media giant’s stock plummeting around 5% on Monday, adding to a drop of about 15% since mid-September.

     

    The stock slide on Monday sent Zuckerberg’s worth down to $120.9 billion, dropping him below Bill Gates to No. 5 on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He’s lost about $19 billion of wealth since September 13, when he was worth nearly $140 billion, according to the index.

     

    On September 13, the Wall Street Journal began publishing a series of stories based on a cache of internal documents, revealing that Facebook knew about a wide range of problems with its products — such as Instagram’s harm to teenage girls’ mental health and misinformation about the Jan. 6 Capitol riots — while downplaying the issues in public.

     

    The reports have drawn the attention of government officials, and on Monday, the whistleblower revealed herself for the first time and accused the social media giant of putting “profit over safety” of its users.

     

    In response, Facebook has emphasised that the issues facing its products, including political polarisation, are complex and not caused by technology alone.

     

    Many social media users are currently on Twitter while the microblogging chief Jack Dorsey is asking how much it cost to buy Facebook’s domain name.

     

  • BREAKING: Facebook, WhatsApp And Instagram Go Down in Major Outage

    BREAKING: Facebook, WhatsApp And Instagram Go Down in Major Outage

     

    Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram went down Monday evening in an apparent outage.

     

    The three apps – which are all owned by Facebook, and run on shared infrastructure – all completely stopped working shortly before 5pm. Other products that are part of the same family of apps, such as Facebook Workplace, also stopped working.

     

    Visitors to the Facebook website simply saw an error page or a message that their browser could not connect.

     

     The WhatsApp and Instagram apps continued to work, but did not show new content, including any messages sent or received during the problems.

     

    Per Down Detector, a crowdsourced website that tracks online outages, the three social networks appeared to be having widespread issues around 11:40 a.m. ET.  The company’s status tracking website was also down around noon ET.

     

    Facebook’s outages happen relatively rarely but tend to be vast in their impact, not least because they affect three of the world’s biggest apps.

     

    The company is often cryptic about the causes of any issues, and does not tend to explain them even after they are fixed. In 2019, for instance, it suffered its biggest outage in years – and said only that it had “triggered an issue” during “routine maintenance operations”.

     

    In a leaked transcript published in The Verge in 2019, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg note that such outages are a “big deal”.

     

     Any problems can often lead people to start using competitors instead, and noted that it can take “months” to win back trust and get people back on Facebook’s platforms – if they come back at all.

     

    As is often the case with these outages, users flocked to other social networks to note that these social networks were down. By 12:06 p.m. ET “Instagram and Facebook” was the top Trending Topic on Twitter in the United States with “WhatsApp” and #instagramdown also gaining traction.

     

    Other trends for Facebook and Instagram quickly dominated other locations in the top 30 spots on Twitter’s list.

     

    It was not immediately clear what caused the issue for the three Facebook-owned properties or when any of the services might be restored.