• By Owen Thomas
    Jul 24, 2007 5:42 PM 149,648
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    A drunk employee kills all of the websites you care about

    365 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.
    (Update: I no longer know whether to trust the source who sent in the tip about a drunk employee.)

    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? Or, with less effort, hitting the emergency-power-off switch that San Francisco's building codes require 365 Main install?

    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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