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Power outage breaks popular web sites

July 24, 2007 › Sandy McMurray | comment

fake news video from The Onion: web crash 2007 Many popular web sites went offline today, thanks to a series of power surges in the SoMa district of San Francisco.

The power problem became worldwide news because it seems to have interrupted power to 365 Main, a busy data centre that provides connections for many well-known web properties. Sites known to be affected by the outage include Craigslist, Technorati, AdBrite, RedEnvelope, Yelp and all SixApart properties (Typepad, Livejournal and Vox).

Not long ago, fake news site The Onion predicted that something like this would happen. The headline for their fake news report was "All Online Data Lost After Internet Crash."

According to O'Reilly Radar, 365 Main issued a back-patting press release this morning that (ironically) celebrated two years of uninterrupted uptime for RedEnvelope, one of their customers. As of this writing, the 365 Main site makes no mention of the service outage, but the press release is gone.

Update: 365 Main responds to questions

July 24, 2007 › Sandy McMurray | comment on this item