Power Outage in San Francisco Downs Several Top Sites

A power outage in San Francisco wiped out the creme of the Web today: craigslist, technorati, typepad, and and Netflix among others. A data center at 365 Main, on the edge of San Francisco's Financial District reportedly serves these sites. The gossip site, Valleywag initially claimed that a drunken person had gotten in and damaged 40 racks, but that was quickly refuted by Robert Scoble and others.

Twitter, once again, proved the most up to date and credible source available, as it has last week during the New York City steam explosion. People reported from their cellphones as information became available.

It is not clear why the data centers involved did not have redundant power. I switched ISPs a year or so ago because San Francisco-based Dreamhost didn't have backup servers.

The San Francisco Chronicle website reported

"Between 30,000 and 50,000 Pacific Gas and Electric Co. customers in San Francisco and the northern Peninsula lost power for several hours this afternoon after what witnesses described as an explosion under a manhole cover on Mission Street, the utility said."

I work for a small company and when a power surge took out our servers we didn't have backup let alone a recovery plan. Found this article while surfing the net. I didn't even data recovery was an option. We're performing regular backups now. Hopefully it won't happen again, but if it does we'll be taking our server to CBL