"A drunk employee kills all of the websites you care about"

Tue Jul 24 22:28:02 UTC 2007

<http://valleywag.com/tech/breakdowns/a-drunk-employee-kills-all-of-the-websites-you-care-about-282021.php>
or <http://tinyurl.com/25ly7m>.

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A drunk employee kills all of the websites you care about

365 Main365 Main, a datacenter on the edge of San Francisco's
Financial District, is popular with Soma startups for its proximity
and its state-of-the-art facilities. Or it used to be, anyway, until a
power outage took down sites including Craigslist, Six Apart's TypePad
and LiveJournal blogging sites, local listings site Yelp, and blog
search engine Technorati. The cause? You won't believe it.

A source close to the company says:

    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.

Whoever it is, while we like how you roll in theory, in practice, we'd
appreciate it if you laid off the servers running websites we actually
use. We're sure 365 Main will deny that such a thing could ever
happen. And, conveniently, the neighborhood is having power troubles,
too. But here's a question: When you have several levels of redundant
power, what could bring your customers' servers down other than
something like an employee physically ripping the plugs out of the
wall?

Update: Technorati's Dave Sifry just sent this email:

    Folks,

    I just wanted to let you know, it looks like San Francisco is
having a MAJOR power event, with outages from the Financial district
all the way down to Daly City. One of our colos at 365 Main Street has
experienced a power outage (never mind that they always swear up and
down that this kind of event can't possibly happen, oh no, they have
multiple redundant systems and they charge us up the wazoo to make
sure that we'll have business continuity, so of course, this isn't
really happening, oh yes) however, our other data centers are all up
and running, so we hope to be back up and running as quickly as
possible.

    I'll keep you all updated on progress, and I appreciate you
bearing with us as we work our way through this...

    Dave
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