We just came across this notice from the Central Computing Services at Birkbeck University London. On Sunday 25 September there was a dramatic failure of their uninterruptible power supply which took out power to most of the servers. We do not know what type of UPS technology they are using but an on-line UPS is designed to fail safely to mains as it has a built-in automatic bypass. In case of UPS overload or failure this transfers the load(s) to the mains supply. On-line UPS from about 8kVA upwards can also be put in parallel/N+1 configurations to bring more resilience.

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