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SALT LAKE CITY — A Saturday afternoon “power surge” at the Triad Center caused both the Deseretnews.com and KSL.com websites to go down for nearly five hours, led to a prolonged interruption in Internet service and lack of access to key production systems served by computer networks.
Burke Olsen, head digital officer of the Deseret News, said a backup power system that was meant to kick on also experienced failure in one of its ancillary systems. The outage had an additional effect on systems that allow content to be made available online. Although redundant systems were in place, they failed to function as expected, Olsen said.
“We regret that today’s power outage adversely affected the systems we use to provide content to our readers online. Following the outage, our first priority was to restore power. Next, our IT team went to work to restore all of the systems that were impacted. We hope to be back up and running at full capacity.”
The power surge also led to the delay of the KSL news broadcast at 4:30 p.m., by one hour. Dave Eskelsen, spokesman for Rocky Mountain Power, said there was a “trip” on a 138,000 volt line that serves the Triad Center area.
He said the utility company is investigating the possibility that a Mylar balloon which conducts electricity floated next to the power line.
Those type of balloons are especially dangerous around power lines because they don’t have to make actual contact, he added.
