Yesterday, NASA's Mission Control Center in Houston lost contact with the International Space Station.
The reason is trivial: the electricity was turned off on the neighboring floor, which caused the telemetry and voice systems equipment to shut down. The "blackout" lasted 20 minutes, after which communication was restored with the help of the Russian space agency.
This morning [25.07.2023] at approximately 8 a.m. Houston time [4:00 p.m. Moscow time], the Mission Control Center had power problems that resulted in us losing communication and telemetry with the ISS from Houston. There were no problems on board, the problems were only on Earth. Approximately 20 minutes after the outage, we contacted the team through Russian channels and explained what happened. The team and equipment were not in danger.
A NASA representative explained that the power outage was due to equipment modernization work.
We knew this could happen, so we prepared backup channels. They were launched approximately 90 minutes after the incident.