De Novo has provided insights into an incident that occurred for the first time in nearly 15 years: the Kyiv data center experienced a power outage lasting 14 minutes. This caused significant disruptions: on April 26, the applications "Diia", "Nova Poshta", and banking terminals were non-operational.
Journalists from EP visited the data center in Kyiv to discuss the event's details with the company’s management.
De Novo serves over 150 clients, including "Oschadbank", "Raiffeisen Bank", "Nova Poshta", Kernel, and others. Approximately 70% of clients use the company’s cloud services, while the remaining 30% host their own equipment at the data center.
On April 26, EP reported that the cause of the outage was not a cyberattack. The company attributed the issue to a problem that occurred during the final stage of replacing the uninterruptible power supply.
To ensure continuous power supply, engineers used a temporary power jumper. At 8:03 AM, as per the plan, the switch was turned to the "off" position in preparation for connecting the new line. However, due to a mechanical defect, the switch did not operate fully, even though the indicator showed everything was off.
When power was supplied through both the new line and the jumper simultaneously, the automation interpreted this as a serious error and shut down the system to prevent an accident.
The power was restored within 14 minutes. However, due to system complexity, full recovery of De Novo's cloud infrastructure took until 9:45, with some client IT systems taking several more hours to restore. Overall, the effects of the incident were resolved by 1:00 PM.
De Novo's CEO, Maxim Ageev, explained that it was practically impossible to foresee such a situation — the switch did not transition to the required position, even though the indicator showed normal operation.
"In over 5000 days of data center operation since November 2010, this is the first shutdown lasting 15 minutes. Our contracts allow for up to 96 minutes of downtime per year, so the incident did not lead to a review of agreements," Ageev noted.
According to him, engineers from the energy equipment manufacturer Schneider Electric arrived promptly on site. The chief engineer of the data center, Oleksandr Yurchenko, added that this switch had been in operation since 2018.
