
What I've gathered so far is AOL was performing maintenance on part
of its UPS system when a power surge/sag affected part of Loudoun
County where AOL is located.  Since AOL's peak usage is in the evening
and late night, it is normal for them to perform maintenance during
the "low-use" time period during the day.  You are also more likely
to get the "best" vendor support during the day.

Parts of two computer rooms in one of AOL's data centers were knocked
off-line for a minute or two.  Several hundred individual servers needed
to be rebooted.  This affected parts of several AOL services such as
Instant Messenger, e-mail, web searching.

There were three different power anomolies in Northern Virginia yesterday.

Normally an external event like a power failure, surge, or sag is
handled by combinations of filters, upses, isolation transformers
and generators.  Its is relatively rare for an external event to
cause problems in a top-level data center.

I sent mail to AOL asking if I had the basic facts correct, but
haven't heard back from them.




