Did You Finish Your Training on Zinc Whiskers?

Today I stumbled across something that blew my mind, and I’ve been in IT long enough to think I’d seen some stuff.

I was documenting some customer infrastructure in one of the many data centers in town today, and saw a manufacturer name I hadn't seen before. So after a little bit of GTS, I see that Eaton bought them and randomly hit a rabbit hole.

What rabbit hole? Effin zinc whiskers man. Tiny, hair-like metallic filaments that spontaneously grow out of galvanized steel surfaces. Think of them like microscopic metal splinters, and apparently, they’ve been blamed for hardware failures in data centers. That’s right: silent, invisible threats that can short out electronics just by floating through the air.

You’re Telling Me There Are Tiny Metal Hairs That Break Servers?

Exactly. Zinc whiskers are real. They’re not some fringe conspiracy. And the worst part? Most IT folks, myself included until today, have never even heard of them.

Turns out they grow from electroplated surfaces, like floor tiles, ladder racks, or support struts—especially the kind used in raised floor environments. They don’t always detach, but when they do, they can get sucked into servers or network equipment and short out components. We're talking about spontaneous outages from something completely invisible unless you're under a microscope.

Why I Love This Business

Here’s the crazy part: we spend so much time securing, cooling, organizing, monitoring, patching; trying to squeeze every bit of uptime and resilience out of our environments, and no one warns us about zinc whiskers.

They aren’t in your training. They don’t show up in your network scans. And no one on your project kickoff call is going to say, “By the way, are we using zinc-whisker-free strut channel?”

And yet, here it is. Eaton (and others) are manufacturing special zinc-whisker-resistant hardware because this is a known issue in the facilities world, but not in most IT playbooks.

Who Cares?

If you manage or design environments with raised floors, structured cabling, or dense equipment racks, it might be time to:

• Ask your facilities or colo provider if they use zinc-free materials.

• Check the spec sheets for ladder racks, floor tiles, struts, and trays.

• At least be aware that if you’re chasing phantom hardware failures, this could be a potential root cause.
  

It’s just another example of how weirdly interdisciplinary IT can be. Sometimes your network drops not because of a config, a bug, or a patch, but because a literal metal hair floated into a switch and zapped it.

We spend so much time learning protocols and platforms that sometimes we miss the physical layer, in the most literal sense.

I just learned about zinc whiskers today. If you hadn’t either, now you have.

You’re welcome. Or... I’m sorry.