Multiple Sites Down In SF Power Outage

corewtfux writes with word of a major outage apparently centered on 365 Main, a datacenter on the edge of San Francisco's Financial District. Valleywag initially claimed that a drunken person had gotten in and damaged 40 racks, but an update from Technorati's Dave Sifry says the problem is a widespread power outage. Sites affected include Technorati, Netflix (these display nice "We're Dead" pages), Typepad, LiveJournal, Sun.com, and Craigslist (these just time out).

Comments

Redundant?

[DogDude]

Don't these large sites have failover capable, redundant servers in multiple physical locations? Why should a failure in one rack, one room, or heck, even one state for the giant sites, effect them?

Re:No Generators?

[eln]

Any data center that advertises high availability should be testing that sort of thing on a regular basis. It's possible that they could fail switchover even if they are being regularly tested, but it is unlikely.

If the "power outage" theory is correct and the "drunken employee" theory is incorrect, as a customer I'd be pissed that the data center I pay tons of money to can't keep my site up in the event of a power outage, which is one of the main perks of hosting at a data center in the first place.

Re:No Generators?

[Frosty Piss]

If the "power outage" theory is correct and the "drunken employee" theory is incorrect, as a customer...

For me it would be other way around. A technology failure I could understand. Letting a drunk employee near my server rack, I could not.