365 Main power failure demonstrates Internet weakness
By Sean P. Aune
For forty-five minutes on July 24th, 365 Main lost power to upwards of 40% of the websites hosted at its data center in San Francisco, CA.
The outage was caused by a electrical surge in a PG&E power transformer under a manhole cover at 540 Mission Street. The facility does have generators in place to defend against surges, but the machinery did not automatically kick in, and had to be started manually.
365 Main has declined to name what companies were affected by the outage, but individually confirmed sites included Craigslist, Technorati, and the Six Apart blogging sites of LiveJournal, TypePad, Vox, and Movable Type. The gift giving site Red Envelope was hit not just with the outage, but the irony of a press release issued the same day saying how they had not had an outage in two years.
Oddly enough, it was only on July 23rd, 2006 that the data center at the Garland Building in Los Angeles lost power, and generators at that facility failed also. That outage caused downtime at sites such as MySpace and the large hosting company, DreamHost.
With more and more people coming to depend on the Internet for so many facets of their life, data center uptime is certainly a priority. With two major failures, literally a year apart, there will probably be many questions as to just how reliable any center truly can be.
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July 27th, 2007
Incorrect. This is an issue for companies that rely on one location. If a company utilizes a service like akamai…no issues. This is not a failure on the part of the internet. Only a failure of foresight by one company that affected a few companies…