Gawker, Buzzfeed, Huffington Post experience Sandy downtime after power knockout

As others have quipped, if you're a celebrity, now is the time to do something stupid. Hurricane Sandy has achieved what Anonymous could not: the ultimate pop culture publishing blackout trifecta. . From tweets by those affected, looks like the culprit was a Sandy-caused power outage in Lower Manhattan, where Buzzfeed, HuffPo, and the Gawker network of sites all have data centers. Backup power is on the way. Kids, the internet isn't dead, this is just what it looked like in 2003! For a brief moment, Boing Boing is the only place to dick around online.

We'll be back soon! There was a data center battery failure after the power went down in Lower Manhattan. Generators powering up. #sandy
— Gizmodo (@Gizmodo) October 29, 2012

#ConEd has begun shutting off electrical service to part of Lower Manhattan - to protect equipment & allow for quicker restoration after...
— Con Edison (@ConEdison) October 29, 2012

Our site is down. Problems with NY-area servers due to Sandy. Be back ASAP.
— BuzzFeed (@BuzzFeed) October 29, 2012

We have been experiencing a major outage over the last few hours. #Sandycam is up due to caching but the rest of our website is down. #Sandy
— Livestream (@Livestream) October 29, 2012

#sandy has fucked us too, but only because our data center is ran by monkeys who spent all the money for emergency batteries in bananas.
— Jesus Diaz (@jesusdiaz) October 29, 2012

Daily Kos servers being powered by generators.
— Markos Moulitsas (@markos) October 29, 2012

Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

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oasisob1

slight keming problem in ‘click around’.
http://glitch.tl/ Michael Smith

Ah yes the old we have a UPS but we didn’t do proper end to end tests of the whole power supply chain problem. It happened in Sydney on the ATC system. In Melbourne on the traffic signal system we cut the mains every three weeks but one weekend a contractor blew the 100A fuses leading into our UPS with a screwdriver.
http://twitter.com/_Engineer666 _Engineer

Been refreshing Jalopnik for the past 15 minutes…
Antinous / Moderator

I was going to say something, but I didn’t want to admit to reading HuffPo.
HowsTheHope

Shit. Gizmodo had the best storm coverage, too.
Maybe that means the time to panic is….now. Aaaaaaaggghhhhh!
franko

no wonder the internet felt better this afternoon.
- EH
  
  I’ve been getting more spam today. Not sure if it’s related.
BarBarSeven

And for a brief moment, even those of us who did not have to work today did more work than they had done previously.
http://twitter.com/librtee Sasha@librtee

woo woo..my VPN is in NYC, when I noticed lifehacker was down I figured mine was too..but it’s sailing through. what a crazy fuckin’ storm, huh?
http://www.zhrodague.net/ Drew from Zhrodague

Oddly enough, Amazon’s eastern part of EC2 was and is still up. I think I noticed the lag when more Sandy-affected datacenters spun up machine to replace hardware. Otherwise, it wasn’t a disaster day for me. Hope all your disks fsck okay.
Harbo

Who says “an ill wind blows no good…”
billyblanks

And nothing of value was lost.