What Do Netflix, Technorati, Craigslist, Typepad, Vox and LiveJournal all have in common? They’re offline today, that’s what. A power outage in San Francisco has left at least 20,000 customers without electricity and might be partially to blame. These datacenters are supposed to have redundant power sources, so it may not be the entire story. If you have more info, please comment and we’ll update the post.
by
Michael Arrington
on
July 24, 2007
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Wow — I just noticed this issue — how long will it take for these sites to get back up do you think? I don’t understand why they don’t have any other options for powering their datacenters, isn’t it a requisite to have serious power backups for when times like these happen?
You can add Vox.com to that list. I just received this message from them:
Dear Vox member,
Vox is currently unavailable due to power issues in the San Francisco
Bay Area that have impacted our co-location facility. This means that
your Vox blog is not reachable at this time. This began at
approximately 1:50 pm Pacific Daylight Time today, Tuesday July 24
2007.
We are working closely with our hosting provider to bring Vox back
online as soon as possible. We sincerely apologize for the
invonvenience this is causing, and we appreciate your patience. We
will send another email update with more information as soon as
possible.
Thank you,
Team Vox
The main reason is it’s near the end of the world.
bah it sucks to be one of the 20,000…
“The main reason is it’s near the end of the world.”
lol — rather dramatic but oh well, we really are nearing the end of the world, it seems so often that our future seems so screwed over. Oy
Digg has been down too.
Our IT folks at VOX say that it will take at least six hours to be fully restored.
Seems to be a common occurrence for so many websites every summer because they’re hosted in California.
Turn off your damn A/C’s, people
Digg is *up* from here…
Netflix was down last night for at least an hour also.
Six Apart owns both Vox and Moveable Type.
NetFlix is back online. It would be nice to know which facility is down. All those sites have their own IP addresses, so it’s hard to determine without some sleuthing.
Or maybe it’s 365 Main’s datacenter. =D
Sean, it’s centrally turned off in SF now
Yelp appears to be down too.
30 years ago this week – New York City went through two days of blackouts
This was pre web – so the business capital of the world really had to endure a hardship
This may be a dumb question, but don’t data centers (I assume these sites are hosted on data centers) brag about having backup power?
-Chris
http://www.nerdcouncil.com
Netflix and Technorati are back now. Quote from Technorati:
We are working with our co-location facility managers to assess why it is back-up power generators failed to provide the necessary back-up power to prevent our site going down.
Alexa is offline too.
fucking 365 Main colo center
I know for sure that 365 Main had power issues- perhaps others in the area as well.
Alex is “up and down” – I’m thinking it might be because of their new toolbar they just made available for Firefox.
Is there a good site on the internet that will display the current “uptime” stats for the top 1000 internet sites? Would be great to see effects of “storms” like this one.
My typepad based blog (www.consumerpassion.com) is down, got this note:
Dear TypePad member,
The TypePad service is currently unavailable due to power issues at
our co-location facility. This means that the TypePad application and
your TypePad blog are not reachable at this time. This began at
approximately 1:50 pm Pacific Daylight Time today, Tuesday July 24
2007.
We are working closely with our hosting partner to bring TypePad back
online as soon as possible. We sincerely apologize for the
inconvenience this is causing, and we appreciate your patience. We
will send another email update with more information as soon as
possible.
Thank you,
The TypePad team
So nearly two hours down time so far. That’s an amazing chunk of time, very troublesome. I can see a short burst of down time, but this … does not bode well.
die nerds die.
The only fault the websites have in this is trusting 365Main and not having redundancy at another location.
The real humor here comes from the press release 365Main released just this morning before everything went down: http://www.prne...1109&EDATE=
They brag about 100% uptime for RedEnvelope, which made RedEnvelope decide to kill redundancy and move everything to 365Main. RedEnvelope had a message on their site earlier saying that it was in the process of updating the site rather than the truth that the site was down.
If it was 365 Main, it may have been a case of hubris. Posted earlier today:
REDENVELOPE REPORTS TWO YEARS OF CONTINUOUS UPTIME AT 365 MAIN’S SAN FRANCISCO DATA CENTER
ROFL:
the VERY second Digg came online – we were able to submit this story
What an irony – getting diggs for them being offline
http://digg.com...in_Power_Outage
Ok, ok I’ll turn the power back on……sheesh why doesn’t everyone just relax!
http://valleywa...nter-282053.php
…wait, Ferd, don’t throw that switch yet my finger is in the……- ZAP!
I just spoke to a K11 news reporter and she told me it was a throng of Harry Potter fans dressed in capes and brandishing wonds…that were the cause of the power outage.
http://valleywa...bout-282021.php
Don’t let Netflix off too lightly. I live opposite 360 Main and the power cut that affected them only hit around 2pm. The Netflix outage started last night at about 11pm…they had about 12 hours of downtime. Much longer than everyone else and completely unrelated to the Main street hosting power problems.
@26: Re RedEnvelope Press Release:
“The site, which specializes in all-occasion gift-giving, has also closed its redundant data center in the Midwest and moved its excess capacity to 365 Main”
I guess, not such a great idea after all. LOL.
Quote from MSNBC article on the Netflix incident:
“The breakdown didn’t appear to be related to San Francisco power outages that were blamed for temporarily knocking out several popular Web sites, including Craigslist, Technorati, Typepad and Livejournal.
Service to Netflix’s site was finally restored around 3 p.m. PDT after Netflix’s engineers had missed several earlier estimated times for fixing the trouble.
Netflix had been in the process of updating its computers to reflect price reductions that took effect Tuesday.”
http://www.msnb...om/id/19932882/
count hi5.com as another victim.
I’ve been at 200 Paul during Power failures. No downtime and no problems. People using 365 main should switch over to 200 Paul. Digital Realty Trust seems to do a much better job.
Our website is at 200 Paul and no problems today at all.
Two words (kinda): George W.
He and his vast right-wing, SF-hating co-conspirators are obviously to blame.
We use Typepad and have been down for over 2 hours. Our site is back up, but we cannot access typepad.com itself.
The people at Six Apart are really irresponsible. There should be a back-up power source for a business that hosts tens of thousands of sites.
http://www.geek...ut-major-sites/
PG&E is reporting 30,000 now and that it was due to a fault in the line that caused an explosion. It interrupted a Fruit of the Loom commercial, as well as taking down above mentioned sites and Second Life as well. Rumor has it that all 15 SecondLife participants called Linden Labs.
It looks like the Qwest backbone in California may be down – http://www.syst...bonereport.html Bad day for backbones…
Now it’s obvious why Google bought those solar panels. Things like this would never happen to them.
Second Life is also down – no logins allowed…
Anyone read the posting on ValleyWag that says some drunk idiot wrecked the hosting computers at 365? Any confirmations out there??
Oh no, it’s like that The Onion video. I’d better start printing off e-mail forwards to hand out on the street once the crash comes.
Here’s what you get when you go to http://www.typepad.com now:
http://status.sixapart.com/
blow by blow reports of how crummy long this is taking to fix.
Planets are in orbit again … all is well at Typepad, after a mere four hours in kaputsville.
I’ve heard from an inside source at 365 Main that it was the iPhone. Too many users trying to access the above mentioned sites have caused the data centre to crash. Apple, Cisco and Duke University are now examining logs…
@steve.. haha. guilty sir. The second I switched to EDGE on my iPhone, the lights came back on
Steve you rock!