St. Charles Health System postponed elective surgeries Thursday after a power outage at a Bend data center owned by BendBroadband’s parent company.

Telephone and Data Systems Inc., which owns BendBroadband and OneNeck IT Solutions, confirmed that its Bend data center, The Vault, went down Thursday morning. Spokeswoman Deanne Boegli said services were restored for the majority of customers in 45 minutes to one hour.

The outage also affected BendBroadband, which is a customer of the data center, but service to the local cable television and internet provider was restored in 20 minutes, Boegli said. She wasn’t sure why the outage affected the hospital system for a large part of the day.

A network outage occurred at 7:30 a.m., and St. Charles put into place “downtime procedures” and postponed elective surgeries, spokeswoman Lisa Goodman said.

By 2 p.m., the system was fully restored, and elective surgeries resumed, she said.

St. Charles also posted on Facebook that an “intermittent network outage” was affecting phones and internet service at all hospitals and clinics.

The outage at The Vault was caused by “a power failure of both our main and backup power systems,” Boegli said. An investigation into what caused the redundant system to fail is ongoing, she said.

Although OneNeck IT described its outage as “brief,” the fact that it happened is a problem, said Scot Brees, a Bend resident who has overseen data centers across the country and still consults with the industry. “In data centers, they put in multiple systems. When they say primary and secondary, that’s like having no redundancy at all.”

— Reporter: 541-617-7860, kmclaughlin@bendbulletin.com