Summary Bullets:
• The fire near the UK’s Heathrow Airport, which closed a key electricity substation, disrupted travel at the world’s second-largest air travel hub.
• The many data centers located nearby (about 10% of UK capacity) showed no disruption as they switched to back-up power supplies.
On Friday March 21, 2025, a fire at an electrical substation providing power to Heathrow, the UK’s leading airport and the second largest in the world, forced its closure, leading to the cancellation of more than 1,000 flights, affecting about 200,000 passengers, and having knock-on effects across the global air travel industry.
Historically, the air travel industry has often been compared to the global telecoms industry, relying on hub-and-spoke networks supporting a network of local, regional, and global carriers. It also has a complicated mix of retail and wholesale (people and freight) customers who have a wide range of needs and destinations.
The analogy started to weaken when the global communications market started revolving less around physical presence, even though all services are delivered along the vast majority of the value chain by infrastructure. With the shift toward the software platforms that play the leading role in service delivery, the communications market has, to an extent, freed itself from direct connections that are wholly owned end to end. It is software that does most of the hard work – whereas the airline sector still needs planes to physically connect its As to its Bs and deliver its services. These days, within the communications industry, applications and services rely increasingly on cloud and data centers – so any failure of this infrastructure would impact enterprises and citizens directly.
As the fire started to dominate the news worldwide, the immediate thought came to mind about the potential impact of the many data centers located near Heathrow Airport – with estimates of 10% of the UK’s data center footprint being located in the vicinity, including the likes of Equinix, Rackspace, Virtus, Digital Realty, and Vantage, among many others. Unlike the retailers-cum-runway managers at Heathrow, none of the data centers reported any problems as they had mechanisms in place to automatically switch to back-up power supply. Had this not been the case, many more people in excess of the impacted 200,000 flight customers would have been impacted, albeit in a less dramatic way. This is a testament to the design and management of data centers around the world – they recognize that downtime is not acceptable and have live plans to prevent it.
It was a little surprising that none of the data center operators looked to make a virtue of this given the PR opportunity presented, especially given the challenging coverage they receive for stretching aging infrastructure. But we should all be thankful that they at least successfully kept their operations up and running on this occasion as air travelers pulled their hair out in frustration.