Internet Outage

The Perfect Storm. Last week we had a convergence of two issues which caused Butler-Bremer to have significant network issues. Most telephone companies, including Butler-Bremer, have back-up power systems in place which consist of a stand-alone generator and a large bank of batteries. The batteries maintain power until the generator kicks in and can take over the power load. Early the week of April 22nd we determined that a short had occurred in our battery pack at the Plainfield office and had technicians in route to work on the issue. Unfortunately, as storms rolled through south east Iowa on Wednesday, Mid-American Energy experienced a wide spread power failure which affected Plainfield. Normally our back up system would respond to this power lose, as it had numerous times in the past, and we would not have lost any network services. In this one isolated case the batteries failed to hold power until the back-up generator could take over and our entire office crashed. This crash effected telephone, Digital TV and Internet services. Our Digital TV and Internet services are controlled by server banks (specialized computers) which do not respond to sudden power loses/subsequent restarts very well and we discovered that a drive on our primary Internet server bank failed to restart. This drive held our data bank which allowed authorization of Internet and e-mail, which is why customers were unable to access either for approximately 8 hours on the 24th. We have a temporary battery system in place and will have a permanent replacement of our battery system installed by mid-week. Additionally we have the majority of Internet services back and will be replacing the damaged servers as soon as we possibly can. We apologize for the inconvenience this outage caused and will be applying a credit to our Internet customers on the May billing.