How much disruption could a 0.07 second power outage really cause? If you're running Toshiba's NAND flash production facilities, apparently the answer is quite a lot.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the world's second largest manufacturer of flash memory suffered a momentary voltage drop at one of its plants in Japan early on Wednesday that caused it to shut down until today. The critical power loss forced many systems offline and though the damage is still being assessed, Toshiba believes that it could reduce shipments for the next two months by as much as 20 per cent.
Since the company accounts for more than a third of the NAND market, this could translate to a 7.5 per cent drop in global flash shipments. If this was the case, it could cause the price of memory to increase quite significantly in response to reduced supplies.
Even though the facility has backup power systems in place to handle just such an emergency, the voltage drop was apparently so severe that they were overwhelmed. Any wafers currently in production are expected to be ruined, as well as any in storage or transit if the air filtration system that keeps the facility 'clean' was compromised.
The only good news is that Toshiba may be able to partially recover by increasing production during the first few months of the new year, when demand is typically slower.
The full extent of the damage isn't clear at this point, but as the plant returns to full operational capacity Toshiba will begin to evaluate the impact that it has had.
