Finally, a bit more info found in this Russian article http://www.comnews.ru/index.cfm?id=15645 According to the director of a well-known but unnamed Russian telecoms company, there were no diesel generators at MSK-IX. They had 3 external power feeds which all failed at once due to the cascading failure. UPS systems lasted from one-half to two hours. He says that they learned the lesson that they need to build a few distributed and technically independent exchanges even in the capital, Moscow. Some background on the power failure. It started with a fire in old equipment which caused a major power station to shed load and shut down in the middle of the night. As the sun rose and Moscow's power demands grew, this initiated a cascading failure which spread 200 kms south. However, it did not affect most of the northern half of the city. It did not affect the military who switched to their own generators. This is rather important considering that this "military" is responsible for roughly half of the serious nuclear weapons arsenal in the world. The military brought out their portable generators to support hospitals so it would appear that all hospitals did not have independent backup power. In Southern Moscow, much of the cellular telephone service also failed. In one of the regional towns a chemical factory released a cloud of nitrogen oxides which cause the population to panic and begin evacuation because in that town even the landlines had failed. After a lot of work, most power stations were back online this morning. There were only 400 apartment buildings with no power compared to thousands yesterday. The damaged station where the fire occurred is still not functioning and some backup power generation is still in place. The metro is running but some suburban electrical train lines are still shutdown. All in all, this was a remarkable event. The causes were identified so quickly. They recovered from the outage so quickly. The country's major Internet exchange was shown to be remarkably short-sighted. --Michael Dillon