A power outage in San Francisco has just wiped out the creme of the Web: craigslist, technorati, typepad, and I don’t know what other services are all down. Update: Netflix is down, too. (hat tip: TechCrunch)

brb

Blackout!
Our power is down. Technorati will be back up soon.

My own blog is sick today for other reasons (check my site24x7 stats – just on the day when I got linked to by several ZDNet blogs and Techmeme ) so I don’t know if this post will make it.

Update:

“There’s a reason we run a ton of servers with a bunch of different Internet providers and put them in a lot of different datacenters.” – says OpenDNS

No wonder they are up

Update: Some, like Netflix and Technorati are back up. Quote from the Technorati blog:

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.

Update: Ouch, Valleywag (you know, your most-credible-source-of-information) has another explanation:

Someone came in shitfaced drunk, got angry, went berserk, and fucked up a lot of stuff. There’s an outage on 40 or so racks at minimum.

Take the above with a grain of salt…

On a more serious note, this reminds me of one line from NetSuite‘s recent IPO filing:

We host our services and serve all of our customers from a single third-party data center facility located in California… We do not currently operate or maintain a backup data center for any of our services or for any of our customers’ data, which increases our vulnerability to interruptions or delays in our service.

Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. We’re not talking consumer Web 2.0 here, companies run their entire business on NetSuite.

But let’s finish this story on a lighter note. Techdirt points out that 365 Main, the hosting facility invoked Murphy’s law against themselves in a PR release just hours before the blackout, when they bragged about how a customer gave up their redundant sites after 2 years of uninterrupted service at 365. They trusted 365 Main, since:

“The company’s San Francisco facility includes two complete back-up systems for electrical power to protect against a power loss. In the unlikely event of a cut to a primary power feed, the state-of-the-art electrical system instantly switches to live back-up generators, avoiding costly downtime for tenants and keeping the data center continuously running.”

Well, if this was “continuosly running”, I don’t want to know what happens when there is an “outage”.

Update 97/25):  There was a bright side to this, as Good Morning Silicon Valley details:

“Unable to work, Web 2.0 programmers slathered themselves with sunscreen and stumbled into the unfamiliar daylight. Families were reunited as thousands of idled bloggers pushed away from the keyboard and were greeted by loved ones. Global temperature dropped as servers and PCs rested silently.”

Also read: GigaOM, TechCrunch, Data Center Knowledge, PC World: Techlog, Between the Lines, Webomatica, Geek News Central, CNET News.com, O’Reilly Radar., Rough Type, Connecting the dots (me, too!) , Don Dodge,  Between the Lines,

Tags: power outage, san francisco, web, soma, technorati, typepad, craigslist, netsuite, site24x7, zoho

About two months ago following Jeff Nolan’s trail I discovered a fresh, challenging, thoughtful new blog, Techfold. I’m glad to see that Rod, the “mystery” author listened to me (and others) and revealed his identity.  His blog is still in my reader (is it, Google?) for it’s good content.

Today Rod is lamenting whether he got de-listed by TechMeme.  I don’t know if you can get “listed” or “de-listed”.  Gabe protects his secret sauce, acknowledging that there is a “seed” group of blogs his algorithm follows, but also adding TechMeme discovers a lot of new sources.   Like I said, I don’t know.  Robert Scoble recently called TechMeme: the anti-linking engine.  This post is an unabashed experiment to see if we can push Techfold onto TechMeme.