Pune: A power failure at the Pimpri Chinchwad Municipal Corporation’s (PCMC) Integrated Command and Control Centre (ICCC) data centre during heavy rain on July 6 triggered a major disruption to the civic body’s digital services, with some operations still affected 10 days later.While most public-facing services have been restored, work to revive the remaining systems is still underway, a senior Smart City official said. “Some systems, such as those related to the building permissions department, are yet to be restored,” the official said.The outage disrupted several online services, including birth and death certificate issuance, marriage registration, citizen grievance redressal and other e-governance facilities. It also stalled the movement of files for approvals across various municipal departments.An internal technical report revealed that the prolonged power outage led to the abrupt shutdown of key servers before a planned shutdown process could be completed. As per the standard operating procedure, the data centre initially switched to UPS backup and was later powered by generators. However, the extended outage exhausted the backup power, forcing officials to initiate a controlled shutdown of the IT infrastructure.With approval from the municipal commissioner and the head of the information technology department, the system integrator began shutting down the Document Management System (DMS), SAP Core and SAP Non-Core application servers. “Before the process could be completed, the backup power supply failed, causing the GIS-enabled ERP servers to shut down unexpectedly,” an official said.Officials said technical teams have since restored the SAP Production System, DMS, GIS platform, SAP Non-Core applications and Active Directory services. Database restoration and API verification have also been completed, allowing most citizen-facing services to resume by July 10.However, restoration work is still underway on the Development and Quality systems, the DNS server, third-party interfaces, parts of the storage infrastructure and the SAP High Availability (HA) environment.During the restoration process, engineers detected the failure of around 25 hard disk drives (HDDs) in the storage infrastructure, affecting the system’s performance and stability.The prolonged outage also disrupted the civic body’s internal functioning. Since PCMC shifted to a fully digital e-file system last year, all files have been processed and approved online using digital signatures.“Road repair estimates requiring approval remained pending because the system was down. For nearly three to four days, we could not clear these files,” a civic official said.
