Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Hurricane Sandy Attacks The Web: Gawker, BuzzFeed and Huffington Post Are ... - TechCrunch

UPDATE: The sites are back up, here’s a statement from BuzzFeed explaining the situation:

Major Media ISP Goes Down

Datagram, the ISP whose Manhattan servers host BuzzFeed, Huffington Post, Gawker, and other sites, has lost power, an official there told us via text this evening.

“Basement flooded, fuel pump off line â€" we got people working on it now. 5 feet of water now,” the official wrote.

BuzzFeed’s site and story page are back online, thanks to a Content Delivery Network, Akamai, which hosts the content at servers distributed around the world.

UPDATE 2: Huffington Post and Gawker have gone down again, and BuzzFeed is available in read-only mode, meaning they can’t post to the actual site at the moment.

UPDATE 3: BuzzFeed gave us a statement about their road to connectivity:

Our incredible team worked all night to bring our servers back to life; BuzzFeed is up and we expect it to remain up. We’re no longer operating off the compromised data center.

If Hurricane Sandy wasn’t scary enough, it’s newest victims are in the blogosphere. We’ve just learned that Gawker’s fleet of sites, including Gizmodo are down. Also Hurricane Sandy victims? The Huffington Post and BuzzFeed.

As you know, New Jersey and New York City is in the storm’s path, and any data centers that are stationed there are surely going to be affected. Big data warehouses usually have multiple failsafe systems in place, but it looks like they were no match for the fury that Hurricane Sandy brings.

Earlier, we reported that FEMA has told residents in the path of the storm to use text messaging and social networks to communicate with family members and friends, as to keep phone lines open. A bigger deal than that? The NYSE and NASDAQ closed down for the day as well.

The Huffington Post has been serving up important resources and links for those affected by the storms, and BuzzFeed has brought us a few laughs to keep us loose. It’s sad to see both sites down. Luckily, Twitter itself posted some great accounts to follow to get updates about the weather.

A BuzzFeed spokeswoman, Ashley McCollum, issued this statement to us:

We’re having hurricane related issues both with our servers and our CDN, and are working on it. The social web is alive and well and our staff will continue to create shareable content for Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr.

As stated, the show must go on and BuzzFeed is keeping the LOLZ coming:

We’ve reached out to the rest of sites who are affected for comment and we’ll let you know once we hear back. Good luck, folks! :/ This really doesn’t look pretty:

We’ve learned from a source that a NYC datacenter was lost because of a power outage, and its failover to Newark was unsuccessful. Servers are rebooting and the situation is being worked on.

[photo credit: flickr]


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