Samsung Blames Fire For Smart TV Content And VoIP Outage

Samsung has blamed a fire at one of its South Korea data centers for taking Smart TV and other services offline for more than four hours over the weekend, including temporarily killing its main website. The fire began on Sunday in an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) at a generator at the facility.

The downtime ran for around 4.5hrs in total, Samsung's server division says.

Although the fire was extinguished, the facility itself had to be shut down so as to minimize damage while data transfer processes took place. In addition to affecting the Smart TV hub on select Samsung models, and the Samsung.com website, the offline servers also affected internet payments and some other apps Samsung operates.

Meanwhile, access to customer services for frustrated would-be users was limited, as Samsung was relying on VoIP to handle incoming calls.

Samsung will be calling in the investigators to try to figure out what happened with the UPS, and says it will be exploring alternative backup options to its use of internet calls for support. It's unclear how many people in total were affected by the downtime.

SOURCE Samsung ICT