TSP Name:                                  Northern Natural Gas Company
TSP:                                       784158214
Notice ID:                                 089653
Notice Type:                               Computer System Status
Subject:                                   NORTHERN'S COMPUTER SYSTEMS OUTAGE RECAP
Critical:                                  N
Post Date/Time:                            05/07/2025 02:15 PM
Notice Status:                             Initiate
For Gas Day(s):                            05/07/2025 - 05/11/2025
Notice Effective Date/Time:                05/07/2025 02:15 PM
Notice End Date/Time:                      05/12/2025 08:59 AM
Required Response Indicator Description:   5-No response required

Notice Text: 


Northern sincerely appreciates its customers'
patience, understanding and swift responsiveness following restoration of the
business applications from the outage that occurred on the morning of May 6,
2025. 



Northern
understands the importance of having reliable business applications. To
maintain this level of reliability, Northern carefully plans system upgrades
and maintenance, and invests in both short-term and long-term redundancy. 



This
event was the result of an unexpected hardware failure during a routine upgrade
to data center servers. Before initiating the upgrade, redundancy was
established to ensure the server upgrade would perform as expected. Though the
specific redundancy plan had been utilized in prior upgrades, the servers
failed to come back online following the completion of the upgrade. While working
to restore service, Northern's IT team was simultaneously preparing to
implement the long-term redundancy plan, if needed.



Northern understands the impact to customers
that a system disruption causes and has consistently provided reliability of
business-critical systems that exceed 99.99% availability. In the event of a
catastrophic outage at one of the corporate data centers, Northern can switch
its systems to an alternate corporate data center, although this takes time. While
Northern was able to correct the server failure, this event will undoubtedly
provide valuable lessons to improve the redundancy Northern employs during
routine upgrade and maintenance activities can be made even more resilient.



If you have any questions, please contact
your marketing or customer service representative.