In January 2025, during the storm in the Brazilian capital, the lightning hit the data center which resulted in the blackout of digital services of Detran. Therefore, the citizens who planned to visit the department were advised on the situation and could reschedule their visits.
The accident also led to the failures in the work of road traffic lights connected to the data center. Detran employees were sent to control traffic in the streets. The department said that technical teams were working on the restoration of the power supply and services asap.
This was not the first case when the lightning strike caused large-scale problems. In July 2023, due to the lightning strike, a cell tower was set on fire in the Lake County, Florida. In July 2022, the lightning strike to the power line left Renesas Electronics in Japan without power, thus resulting in a week of downtime.
We previously wrote about the lightning strike to a data center: due to four lightning strikes, Google lost user data.
Such incidents emphasize the sensitivity of critical infrastructure to natural events and the need to improve its safety.
Our website contains several articles on lightning protection of data centers. See "What do we need to know about the protection of data centers?" and the example of the grounding and lightning protection design for the data center, example of calculation of the lightning protection and grounding for the data center in Moscow and a report on the installation of the electrolytical grounding for the data center in Ekaterinburg.
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