Power outage seems really odd. Don't datacenters usually have multiple redundant power supplies + on-site backup power generation? Maybe power "incident" mean something else?
derecho storms hammered the area and killed power. external power lines in failed, and the ATS hung or died when switching to the N+1 diesel generators.
since it never got switched to diesel, the UPS systems kept things going for the standard interval (e.g. ~3-5 minutes) and then ran out of power, and then everything went down. AWS died and IIRC it took a lot of stuff with it, most notably reddit, etc.
They are lucky they were able to walk away, but the facility was dark till someone could get in there and give the power equipment the green light.
That was an epic mess. Especially considering they positioned themselves as the most technically sophisticated colo in the region. So, yeah, it happens.
Tl;Dr fire in one data center hall was put out with water, water leaked into other hall's power generator and battery area. Turns out loads of water and power generation equipment don't mix well, and servers don't like sitting in puddles of water.
Another one was where the whole building burnt down rather than "just" the power equipment. https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/fire-destroys-ovh...