Case Study: Hokkaido Electric Power Company achieves rapid, disaster-resilient website continuity with Microsoft Azure

After major earthquake, Hokkaido Electric Power moves its website to the cloud, inspires cloud-first IT strategy

Hokkaido Electric Power Co., Inc., the sole power supplier for Japan’s Hokkaido region, faced a critical communications challenge after the magnitude-6.7 earthquake on September 6, 2018. The quake caused a region-wide blackout and sudden spikes in website traffic (50–100× normal), making power-outage and restoration information sites inaccessible and exposing the risk that on‑island datacenter outages could prevent information delivery during future disasters.

Seven hours after the quake the company migrated its information-delivery systems to Microsoft Azure, using Azure App Service and a CDN, with Microsoft support and Teams for coordination. Within a day Hokuden had restored online information delivery with automatic scaling to absorb traffic surges, eliminated single‑site disaster risk, and adopted a cloud-first IT strategy—planning further public-cloud migrations, improved BCP, and wider use of Teams and Microsoft 365.

Hokkaido Electric Power Company

Yasuki Fujiya

Manager, Information Systems and Telecommunications Department