A “power blip” Friday morning at a third-party data center caused widespread flight delays for Hawaiian Airlines and operational disruptions at other businesses including Bank of Hawaii, Hawaii Pacific Health and The Queen’s Medical Center.
Rosa White, co-founder of DRFortress, declined to say exactly how many businesses were affected. The company was “in the middle of a maintenance” and had a “maintenance issue” that caused the internet outage that affected “some” of their clients, she said.
“We are sorry that we impacted our customers and their customers,” White told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser in an interview.
Hawaiian Airlines was unable to dispatch flights between 9 a.m. and noon Friday, and the outage caused “significant delays.”
Two Kahului-bound flights from the West Coast were diverted to Daniel K. Inouye International Airport due to space constraints at Kahului Airport, Tara Shimooka, external communications manager for Hawaiian Airlines, told the Star-Advertiser.
“About 9 a.m. (Friday) we experienced a temporary internet outage in Hawaii due to a power disruption at our third-party data vendor during scheduled maintenance,” Shimooka said. “The outage, impacting our Hawaii systems and headquarters, has been resolved, but we are experiencing flight delays as a result of the temporary outage. We’re working with affected guests and sincerely apologize for the inconvenience.”
The internet outage is unrelated to Hawaiian Airlines’ recent passenger service system transition.
Flight safety was not affected, Shimooka said.
“We are now concentrating our efforts on resuming our flight schedule and safely getting our guests to their destinations,” she said.
DRFortress provides services to an undisclosed number of local businesses including Bank of Hawaii, The Queen’s Medical Center, Hawaii Pacific Health and the Star-Advertiser.
The Star-Advertiser experienced operational issues for about an hour.
“Bank of Hawaii experienced a temporary service interruption, due to a power outage at a third-party data center, DRFortress,” Melissa Torres-Laing, senior vice president of corporate communications for the bank, told the Star-Advertiser in a statement. “Operations are functionally normally across the bank, including branch locations, ATMs and call center.”
The Queen’s Medical Center had a “few internal services” that were “temporarily affected.”
“Patient safety was not impacted,” said Sean Ibara, a Queen’s spokesperson.
Hawaii Pacific Health experienced a “momentary power outage to its IT systems” due to the power outage, according to a statement from the company.
Contingency plans allowed care to continue, and once systems were back online, the HPH team completed its internal checks and returned to its normal workflow.
According to the company’s website, “DRFortress is the largest and the only carrier-neutral data center and cloud marketplace operating in Hawaii. For over 16 years, we have been meeting the data center needs of Hawaii’s enterprises, content companies, system integrators, carriers, wireless service providers, cable companies and ISPs.”
The company “houses the densest concentration of IP carriers and networks in Hawaii. We are also the largest commercial Internet Exchange in the state,” according to the website.
