Not everyone’s data centers were ready for Hurricane Sandy. Several major media sites — Buzzfeed, Gawker, Huffington Post — took major hits early Monday evening Eastern Time. The problems were all attributed to massive storm, which made landfall near Atlantic City, N.J., at around 8 p.m. local time.
Update: Many of these sites were impacted when Con Ed shut off power to lower Manhattan.
Gawker is temporarily down because the 57th Street Crane just flooded our servers with sea foam, or something. Back with you shortly.—
(@Gawker) October 29, 2012
Due to #Sandy we're experiencing technical difficulties and are working to be back up as soon as possible.—
Huffington Post (@HuffingtonPost) October 29, 2012
Pushing out stuff through Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr while we resolve our site issues, you guys! Follow and like us.—
(@BuzzFeed) October 30, 2012
BuzzFeed and Gawker are down. You may experience an unfamiliar emotional reaction to events. This is known as earnestness and should pass.—
(@pourmecoffee) October 29, 2012
Daily Kos servers being powered by generators.—
Markos Moulitsas (@markos) October 29, 2012
Con Ed has started shutting off power in Brighton Beach and parts of lower Manhattan bit.ly/XJdxed—
NBC New York (@NBCNewYork) October 30, 2012
#ConEd Manhattan outages were caused by flooding in company substations and engineers are working hard to correct the problem—
Con Edison (@ConEdison) October 30, 2012
To put the media outages into perspective, more than 3 million people in the storm’s path have no power, according to The Weather Channel’s Hurricane Central.
Stay tuned for updates.
Update 2 (1:15am ET): Gawker is still down completely, and BuzzFeed has only partially recovered, with many story pages still unavailable. The site’s team is instead using Tumblr to update its readers on the hurricane.
+ gizmodo.com