Christopher J. Buckley

Word reaches me that multiple major websites are down as a result of a major power outage in San Francisco, CA. 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.

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

Sites affected include Technorati, Netflix (these display nice “We’re Dead” pages), Typepad, LiveJournal, Sun.com, and Craigslist (these just time out).

I, personally, am amazed that none of these significant websites employ global server load balancing. Major load-balancer vendors such as F5, Cisco, NetScaler and Zeus all offer first-class GSLB offerings.