http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/07/365_main_datace.html tells us that a data centre in San Francisco went down through power problems yesterday, taking out some pretty big and important web 2.0 businesses including:
- Technorati
- Livejournal blogging
- Typepad blogging
- Vox blogging
- Craigslist, the classified listings site, owned by ebay
We had intermittent power problems ourselves in SF as well yesterday, so it sounds like something fairly widespread.
I spend a lot of time thinking about how we make sure websites stay up and working, and it’s quite possible, yet we have some examples here of pretty important web 2.0 websites just not working. My guess is they relied on a “100% power continuity” guarantee from a hosting company. If you’re running a website as a serious Internet business, my view is you need to plan to avoid problems like this altogether, perhaps by mirroring data centres.
And what if it’d been something even more popular and pervasive that’d gone down, like Facebook? There are people in our office who would need counselling if Facebook went down.
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