Power Outage!
Shortly after lunchtime as we were all getting back to work, the power went out here at PC World Central. Then it came back. Then it died again. And came back, and died, and came back again. And again. It got so even when it was on we couldn't be productive--we assumed, not unreasonably, that it was about to go off again.
Normally, power troubles here at our offices don't have any impact on PCWorld.com, since the servers the site lives on are ensconced at a state-of-the-art data center. But it turned out that the power wasn't just going off at PCW--it was happening all over town, apparently as a result of an underground explosion. The affected area also included the location where PCWorld.com's servers are housed.
So PCWorld.com was down for about half an hour, and our forums were dead a bit longer. At least they had some good company--a bunch of other sites, such as Craigslist, Technorati, Yelp, and Six Apart's LiveJournal, TypePad, and Vox live at 365 Main, our host, and they were knocked out of commission, too.
Data centers, of course, have redundant power backup systems that are supposed to keep them chugging even when the lights go out. That didn't happen in this instance, and we're not yet sure why.
Me, I happened to be working on a notebook during all the excitement, so I didn't lose any data. And I saw the outage as a good chance to use my cell phone as a high-speed modem. But by the time I had everything set up, the outage was over.
Anyhow, it's good to be back. Thanks for your patience, if you were one of the folks who tried to visit us online and couldn't...
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You should put your servers in a blimp, then transfer with satellites. Just joking... =)
Sounds like St. Louis when a very small rain shower comes through and knocks out power to thousands of people.
It would seem to me that if a business is located in San Francisco, which is known to have earthquakes and tremors, it would have a disaster plan in effect - big time. A blackout like the one you described is nothing compared to what would happen in the event of a real emergency post-earthquake. So now that PCW has figured out that they're not covered in such a situation, is anyone there doing anything about improving the disaster recovery plan for your business?