Hurricane Sandy (which has now been downgraded to a "post-tropical cyclone") made landfall yesterday, bringing with it destruction and mayhem. With up to 46 people reported dead as a result of the storm, and millions of people along the East Coast of the United States without electricity, Sandy is being described as the costliest storm in United States history. US President Barack Obama stated "major disasters" in Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York City, where electricity sub-stations were seen to blow up as a result of storm damage, causing power outages in many areas including Lower Manhattan.
Extensive flooding and power cuts saw many leading websites brought offline for significant periods. News website Huffington Post was knocked out for several hours and forced to create a temporary website at status.huffingtonpost.com until full service was resumed. The British version of the Huffington Post ran a website with a very basic "hand-drawn" design until the full version was available again. Gadget guide Gizmodo is still offline at the time of going to press, while social content website BuzzFeed resumed service after several hours offline. Gawker was forced to go live with a different format of its news and gossip sheet as a result of server issues.
Both BuzzFeed and Gawker used servers at web hosting provider Datagram, which is located in Lower Manhattan. A statement from Datagram suggested that once Sandy had reached Manhattan, the basement of its data center "completely filled with water". The statement went on to add that with the company’s electrical systems completely submerged it was forced to "shut down to avoid fire and permanent damage".
A number of other web hosts located in New York were also affected, including Internap who also reported "sub-basement flooding" as a result of the storm. In a statement posted on Pastebin.com, Matt Price, the company’s Hosting Operations and Support Director stated, "Please be advised that Internap's LGA11 facility is experiencing significant flooding in the sub-basement of the 75 Broad Street building as a result of Hurricane Sandy. The flooding has submerged and destroyed the site's diesel pumps and is preventing fuel from being pumped to the generators on the mezzanine level. The available fuel reserves on the mezzanine level are estimated to support customer loads for approximately 5-7 hours. Once this fuel supply has been exhausted the generator will no longer be able to sustain operation and critical customer power loads will be lost." The statement went on to recommend, "Agile customers are advised to begin shutting down their servers immediately. For our Pro-managed customers, the customer support team will begin shutting down your servers gracefully at 12:30am EST to avoid damage to your equipment. For our cloud customers, we will also being shutting down the infrastructure at this time." Despite their problems the company reported no data loss.
The United States governments’ Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has taken full control of managing the crisis, but no estimates have been given regarding when power will be restored across major parts of Eastern USA. Our hearts and prayers go out to everyone impacted by this major natural disaster.
