Some customers and tour operators of Brittany Ferries have been left unable to make bookings through the operator's website and over the phone for nearly a week following a major data centre fire in the Netherlands.
The French company's reservations system for its UK/ France-Guernsey (St. Peter Port) services have been down since last Thursday, affecting routes linking Poole, Portsmouth, Jersey (St. Helier), and also St. Malo, Normandy.
According to a Dutch media report, a complex blaze took place at the NorthC's site in Almere, located close to Amsterdam. The incident had led to a nationwide firefighting response and caused outages in the network across the country. The outage has also affected some GP practices and at Utrecht University, south of the port city.
The NorthC centre, which is nearly equivalent to the size of four football pitches, has described the incident as involving "temporary, redundant power and cooling," with systems "being restarted in phases" and work to reconnect to the main grid currently underway.
Meanwhile, the impact on Brittany Ferries and their customers who rely on English Channel services to the Channel Islands has been significant.
ITV News has more on the disruption to bookings, noting Afloat adds that the Guernsey-Jersey link is operated by Islands Unlimited, but bookings can be made through the Brittany Ferries website. The inter-island service is a passenger-only high-speed catamaran operation.
