A lightning strike has hit a data center in Brasilia, Brazil, rendering its digital services unavailable.

The Department of Transit (Detran) reported that the strike on 23 January had taken Detrans services offline.

Detran said that citizens who had scheduled appointments at the Department were warned and offered appointments at a later date.

Due to the outage, traffic lights powered by the data center experienced issues. However, Detran said maintenance teams are working to restore power, and traffic officers were deployed to manually control traffic flow.

In addition, the department noted that its technology teams are working to restore customer services as soon as possible.

This isn't the first time lighting strikes have led to outages.

In July last year, a cell tower in Lake County, Florida, caught fire after being struck by lightning.

Also, in July 2022, a semiconductor fab in Japan was put out of action for a week following a lightning strike on a power line feeding the Renesas Electronics chip factory in Kumamoto Prefecture.