The NSA Fast-Tracked Its Gigantic New Data Center and Now It's Melting

You know that massive datacenter the NSA's been building out in Utah? The one for which superlatives abound? The biggest ever built; the finest in the government; a billion dollars to construct; potentially capable of storing a bloody yottabyte of data—enough to house a hundred years' worth of electronic communications. That one. Well, it's broken.

The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that the NSA's new data center in Bluffdale, Utah, has been experiencing a series of electrical failures—10 in the last 13 months—that are blowing circuits and melting the metal machinery.

The meltdowns have rendered the center all but useless and will delay the center's opening about a year. Meanwhile, it costs some $100,000 each time there's a circuit explosion, according to the report. An NSA spokeswoman confirmed that the electric failures occurred during testing.

Is it poetic justice that the home of the government's Orwellian online surveillance is burning down? Or a senseless waste of taxpayers' dollars and gross display of defense overspending?

No matter how you look at it, it's a pretty epic fail, and one that probably could have been avoided. After an Army Corps of Engineers team investigated the problem this summer they reported that in an attempt to fast-track the construction, the NSA's contractors cut corners that undermined quality control.

“The problem, and we all know it, is that they put the appliances too close together,” a source familiar with the construction told Forbes. “They used wiring that’s not adequate to the task. We all talked about the fact that it wasn’t going to work.”

Like all things NSA-related, both the construction of the gargantuan data center and the investigation into its meltdowns are masked in secrecy. (Case in point: the video above shows the confrontation that went down in the center's parking lot when a pair of journalists tried to get a look at it last week.) But according to what officials will report back to the press, the engineers and contractors tasked with repairing the datacenter have yet come to a consensus over exactly what's causing the electrical explosions.

Sprawled across 247 acres in the heart of Mormon country, the data center was slated to be up and running last month so the agency could get to work cracking encryption codes and clandestinely analyzing and storing troves of personal data on citizens around the world.

Now it looks like the data spies are going to have to wait a bit longer. The Army Corps of Engineers told the Journal, the causes "are not yet sufficiently understood to ensure that the NSA can expect to avoid these incidents in the future."