University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory - Status Page
System Under Maintenance
West Cambridge Data Centre full outage for planned electrical works
Scheduled for 17 September, 2025 at 16:00 – 18 September, 2025 at 16:00 1 day
Update
18 September, 2025 at 14:10
In progress
18 September, 2025 at 14:10
Departmental IT services have been restored. Please contact service-desk@cst.cam.ac.uk if you encounter any remaining problems with these.
University-wide services are still being restored, per UIS's announced schedule, and may not be fully available again until tomorrow.
Some further work is needed to undo some temporary changes to departmental infrastructure, which will take place out-of-hours.
Update
18 September, 2025 at 13:46
In progress
18 September, 2025 at 13:46
UIS has announced that the planned electrical works in WCDC have completed early. We are starting to restore our services now. This will take time to complete.
Update
18 September, 2025 at 12:40
In progress
18 September, 2025 at 12:40
Power was unexpectedly restored around 13:10 before the maintenance was announced as complete. This caused many systems to automatically start again. For safety, we are shutting affected systems down again now in case power is again lost.
In progress
17 September, 2025 at 16:12
In progress
17 September, 2025 at 16:12
Maintenance is now in progress. Systems will gradually shut down over the course of this evening, and will not come back up until Thursday evening at the soonest.
We will start with some relatively low-impact network infrastructure firmware upgrades (which will cause intermittent loss of connectivity to Morello systems in WCDC) and storage software updates, and will then proceed to shut down our VM infrastructure.
Update
17 September, 2025 at 16:00
Planned
17 September, 2025 at 16:00
This maintenance will not start until 17 September. Our status page platform has sent out a couple of incorrect emails about the timing of this maintenance; apologies for the confusion.
As previously announced, UIS have notified us that essential electrical works will be carried out at the West Cambridge Data Centre (WCDC) on 18 September 09:00-17:00. The entire data centre will be switched off all day.
This will affect many departmental services (several of our servers are hosted in WCDC) as well as other services in the broader University. Many departmental services will be shut down on the evening of 17 September and will remain offline until at least the evening of 18 September.
More details on the precise impact:
The following departmental systems will be unavailable:
Departmental databases: dbwebserver, svr-win-db
All research and teaching VMs, except dev-gpu-* and dev-cpu-*
SSH servers: ely, svr-ssh-0 (use slogin.cl.cam.ac.uk instead which will be changed to point at svr-ssh-1, hosted elsewhere)
This maintenance will not start until 17 September. Our status page platform has sent out a couple of incorrect emails about the timing of this maintenance; apologies for the confusion.
UIS have notified us that essential electrical works will be carried out at the West Cambridge Data Centre (WCDC) on 18 September 09:00-17:00. The entire data centre will be switched off all day.
This will affect many departmental services (several of our servers are hosted in WCDC) as well as other services in the broader University. Many departmental services will be shut down on the evening of 17 September and will remain offline until at least the evening of 18 September.
We are planning the precise departmental impact and possible mitigations, and will add more information to this page in due course.
We know however that most departmental-hosted VMs (except GPU VMs) and departmental administrative systems (for example dbwebserver and the underlyng databases) will be shut down for the duration.