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Comment by rogeryu | Hacker News Reader

Almost as impressive is the fact that in 18 years, the electricity had no downtime.

True, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was a UPS that this thing was plugged into

Yes, I thought about that too, but I guess that UPS will not survive 18 years - the battery for sure, the device probably neither. Can you replace one without shutting down the server?

If the UPS is connected to one of a redundant pair of PSUs, yes.

You just need one of these switches that allow you to switch between ups/grid power and you can change the ups without shutting down the server.

It's not too uncommon to have such uptimes for electricity.

The last blackout I personally saw was in 2006, the famous one which killed half of Europe's grid.

With average yearly downtime of 17min, it's not hard to find places that had no downtime for decades.

Thats the benefit of lines below the ground :)

Situation is a bit different in America

Half of Europe? Probably not.

Yes, half of Europe.

> Twenty eight seconds later, an electrical blackout had cascaded across Europe extending from Poland in the north-east, to the Benelux countries and France in the west, through to Portugal, Spain and Morocco in the south-west, and across to Greece and the Balkans in the south-east.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_European_blackout

There were even some TV documentaries about it, and in some areas it continued for days.

Parts of several countries were affected. Other parts had no outage. Depending on the view point, the blackouts a few years earlier in Italy and US were more widespread.

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