• The 511 Building hosts MICE, dozens of carriers and several colocation providers serving Minnesota and the Upper Midwest
  • The disruption raises a resilience issue: backup circuits can still depend on the same physical interconnection site

The Fact

An outage at the 511 Building in downtown Minneapolis on 6 August disrupted internet connectivity across parts of Minnesota and the wider Midwest, according to MPR News. The 511 Building, also known as the Minnesota Technology Center, is a carrier hotel where telecoms operators, internet providers and other networks interconnect. It hosts the Midwest Internet Cooperative Exchange (MICE), dozens of carriers and several colocation providers.

The building advertises redundant infrastructure, including UPS and generator backup and multiple power and cooling configurations. Carriers, cloud providers and MICE use the site to exchange regional traffic. MPR reported that the disruption affected users and services beyond Minneapolis before connectivity was restored.

The assessment

Buying network service from two carriers does not necessarily give an operator two independent physical paths. Both circuits can enter the same carrier hotel, use the same exchange or depend on infrastructure inside the same building. If that shared point is disrupted, the backup route can be exposed to the same incident as the primary one.

The 511 outage shows why operators need to look beyond the carrier name. Two circuits can come from different providers but still pass through the same building or depend on the same power and interconnection equipment. A backup route is more useful when it follows a genuinely separate physical path. The outage does not show that every network in the 511 Building failed, or that all disruptions that day had the same cause. For BTW readers, resilience planning should check where each circuit actually runs. Two carrier contracts can still depend on the same physical site.

What to watch

Watch for a post-incident explanation from the 511 Building, MICE or its colocation providers on what failed and how service was restored. Also watch whether carriers or customers add connections through another Minneapolis facility. That would show whether the outage is prompting operators to separate backup routes physically, rather than adding more services in the same building.