Heathrow fire: Datacentres remain open

Fire has grounded all flights for 24 hours

A power outage at Heathrow has caused the airport to ground all flights – but datacentres are still operating.

In a statement on its website, Heathrow said, “Due to a fire at an electrical substation supplying the airport, Heathrow is experiencing a significant power outage.

“To maintain the safety of our passengers and colleagues, Heathrow will be closed until 23:59 on 21 March.

“Passengers are advised not to travel to the airport and should contact their airline for further information. We apologise for the inconvenience.”

The assistant commissioner of the London Fire Brigade, Pat Goulbourne, said the incident was “very visible and significant,” but was “successfully contained.”

He added, "The fire has caused a widespread power outage, affecting many homes, local businesses, and Heathrow Airport.

“While power has been restored to some properties, we continue to work closely with our partners to minimise disruption.”

It is reasonable to assume that some of the datacentres near Heathrow use the same substation, but so far none have reported an incident.

We checked status pages for major cloud providers, including AWS, GCP, Azure, Rackspace and Virtus, but none have reported a service disruption. We have reached out for comment and will update this story if we hear back.

Datacentres tend to have robust emergency response plans, which include batteries and diesel generators to maintain uninterrupted power, and can operate for an extended period of time without a connection to the Grid.

Heathrow, a spokesperson told us, has a similar arrangement, with backup generators and uninterruptible power supplies – all of which operated as expected. However, the airport consumes too much energy for this to be more than a stop-gap measure to land aircraft and evacuate passengers.

The airport is currently implementing a process to redirect power to affected areas, but this takes time.