What went wrong at Lumen?
A mess inside the Lumen building in downtown Des Moines caused a telecommunication issue this week that left tens of thousands of Iowans without phone and internet service, including a landline 9-1-1 outage.Pictures showing puddles on the floor inside the building long after the leak was detected help tell the story. A broken water pipe Thursday morning led to the massive system failure, which was restored for most customers in the early hours Friday.ISU professor Guy Helmer has no inside knowledge of Lumen’s leak. But those pictures and the resulting outage give him an idea of what happened. “Water getting in the wrong spot and taking out the systems. Even the redundant battery and generator support. It takes all the systems down,” Helmer said. Helmer has 30 years of experience in data centers and internet services. He tells KCCI that when there is a central office failure, it is difficult to stop the inevitable.”A lot of our communications for even cell phones, and especially landlines and such, go through central offices,” Helmer said. We paid a visit to Aureon, a telecommunications service provider that’s similar to but smaller than Lumen. The broken water pipe affected its 911 and long-distance service.Aureon was able to react on the fly when they realized it was not an issue with their network.”Having the team step up and convert those customers quickly to different paths through the network, throughout the state, different providers really felt good that we could take care of our clients in a quick manner,” said Scott Johnson, Aureon senior vice president. Johnson says you can’t predict every failure scenario. But it is important to be trained and experienced when things go wrong you are not stuck in one place.”You try to look at all the different scenarios and try to have a plan in place,” Johnson said.
A mess inside the Lumen building in downtown Des Moines caused a telecommunication issue this week that left tens of thousands of Iowans without phone and internet service, including a landline 9-1-1 outage.
Pictures showing puddles on the floor inside the building long after the leak was detected help tell the story. A broken water pipe Thursday morning led to the massive system failure, which was restored for most customers in the early hours Friday.
ISU professor Guy Helmer has no inside knowledge of Lumen’s leak. But those pictures and the resulting outage give him an idea of what happened.
“Water getting in the wrong spot and taking out the systems. Even the redundant battery and generator support. It takes all the systems down,” Helmer said.
Helmer has 30 years of experience in data centers and internet services. He tells KCCI that when there is a central office failure, it is difficult to stop the inevitable.
“A lot of our communications for even cell phones, and especially landlines and such, go through central offices,” Helmer said.
We paid a visit to Aureon, a telecommunications service provider that’s similar to but smaller than Lumen. The broken water pipe affected its 911 and long-distance service.
Aureon was able to react on the fly when they realized it was not an issue with their network.
“Having the team step up and convert those customers quickly to different paths through the network, throughout the state, different providers really felt good that we could take care of our clients in a quick manner,” said Scott Johnson, Aureon senior vice president.
Johnson says you can’t predict every failure scenario. But it is important to be trained and experienced when things go wrong you are not stuck in one place.
“You try to look at all the different scenarios and try to have a plan in place,” Johnson said.
