48-Hour Power Cuts for 9,089 Companies: How to Prepare Servers, Network and Cameras Before Your Block
On Friday, October 2, Ecuador's power distributors began notifying 9,089 high- and medium-voltage companies that they will face 48-hour consecutive power disconnections over the next two weeks, as reported by Primicias and the EFE news agency (via Infobae). The goal is to cut demand and preserve water in the Mazar reservoir during the dry season. According to Environment and Energy Minister Juan Carlos Blum, for now the cuts apply only to industry: homes and shops are not included.
If your company received that notice, the plan doesn't end at the machines: the ERP server, invoicing, phones, the internet link and the cameras lose power too.
What We Know About the Measure
- Who: 185 High Voltage 1 companies, 4 High Voltage 2 companies and about 8,900 medium-voltage companies.
- How: blocks of 48 consecutive hours, Monday to Saturday, with companies grouped by geographic sector.
- Why: on October 2, Mazar stood at about 2,131 meters above sea level, roughly 16 meters above its minimum operating level, according to Celec data cited by Primicias and El Mercurio.
- What hasn't been decided: the Consultative Council of Engineering proposed daily two-hour cuts in the early morning, including homes, according to Vistazo. It is a proposal, not an official measure.
A UPS Won't Cover 48 Hours
A UPS is built to provide minutes, not days: it keeps equipment from shutting off abruptly and covers the time a generator needs to start. For a two-day outage there are three paths, and they are usually combined:
- Generator: if your plant has its own generation, make sure the IT room, the router, the ISP's fiber equipment, the switches and the camera recorder are on backed-up circuits. Keep the UPS between the generator and the equipment: startup isn't instantaneous and generator power can be less stable than grid power.
- Orderly shutdown: if there is no generator for IT, shut down servers and storage on a planned basis before the cut, instead of waiting for the batteries to run out.
- Move critical services out of the plant: if invoicing or the files the sales office uses live on a server inside the factory, nobody will be able to use them for 48 hours. Moving them to the cloud or a data center makes them independent of the plant's meter.
What to Check Before Your Disconnection Block
- Confirm dates and times with your distributor and let customers and suppliers know if services will be offline.
- Map your dependencies: which equipment sits in the plant and who uses it from outside (ERP, invoicing, shared folders, VPN, phones).
- Back up and test the restore before the cut. With a copy outside the plant (3-2-1 rule), damage from the outage won't take your data with it.
- Automate the shutdown: connect the UPS to the server via USB or network and configure its software to shut equipment down when the battery runs low. Besides the manufacturer's software, there is Network UPS Tools (NUT), free and open source, which can coordinate the shutdown of several machines powered by the same UPS.
- Don't leave the plant blind: an empty factory without power for two days is a security risk. If cameras and alarms won't be backed up, arrange physical security for those hours.
- Plan the restart: power up in order (internet and network, then storage, then servers and applications), use surge protection, and check that scheduled backups actually ran.
How We Approach It at SimCodec
At SimCodec we help companies in Quito and across Ecuador get through these cuts without losing data or stopping invoicing: we review what depends on the plant's power, size UPS units and set up automatic shutdown, put the network and video surveillance on the right circuits and, when it makes sense, move critical services to the cloud with backups that can actually be restored.
If your company is on the disconnection list and you want to review your plan before the next block, write to us or call our AI assistant Cyntia at +593 99 726 6838.
