Hurricane Sandy didn’t spare the internet!
Data centers and servers powering many websites were also hit, knocking popular websites offline for hours.
Datagram, the Internet service provider based in New York City that powers news sites like Gawker.com, Huffingtonpost.com, and Buzzfeed.com turned out as the biggest casualty. When its servers went down on Monday night due to flooding, the sites it powered went down with it. Due to electrical systems being underwater the building was forced to shut down to avoid fire and permanent damage.
Gawker, owner of sites such as Gawker.com, Gizmodo and Jezebel, also went down late last night. Gawker switched to WordPress and Tumblr, different website and blogging platforms, as backups for its site. Gizmodo has been live blogging the aftermath of Sandy on its Sandy 2012 Emergency Site.
Meanwhile, Buzzfeed.com and The Huffington Post were also affected by Datagram’s outage. Buzzfeed, a site that has surged in popularity in the last couple of months, was able to recover its full site, though, more quickly than others were. Similarly, The Huffington Post had a backup server in Newark to rely on.
On Tuesday afternoon Datagram had reported that Consolidated Edison and city workers were helping to restore the services and that there were “at least five pumps pumping water from the basement into the street.” While Datagram will eventually come back online, Kidder added that Gawker will be speeding up its plans to have a second data center.
