Sporadic power outages in San Francisco on Tuesday brought down a number of popular websites.
Craigslist, Typepad, Secondlife and Technorati were among the sites that went offline when power at a large data center failed.
The power outage affected around 400,000 businesses and individuals and the lights went back on at around 3:30 PST.
A spokesperson for PG&E said a fault in their underground electric system was to blame and that breakers that didn’t shut down properly caused fluctuations which caused the power outages.
Hasn’t anyone ever heard of generators especially big websites like these.
It certainly doesn’t sound like it. Generators cost a lot of money and unless you have power outages frequently, many companies (obviously) can’t justify the investment for something that only happens once in a blue moon.
We had a massive power outage back in 2004 (the power was down for as long as 3 days in some places, but we were back up and running in about 24 hours) and when we looked at the price of generators there was just no way.
I suppose that if you’re running a large NOC, it might be worth having though.. especially with such large clients and websites.
I’m running a UPS for my server and when we have occasional power outages it does fine they are very very cheap now anyway, so I can keep running my wireless connection and use my laptop.
They are worth it even to shut down the computers so it gives you a chance to save the hardwares lifespan.