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NYC data centers hit by Hurricane Sandy

As Hurricane Sandy delivers a glancing blow to New York City, the power company pulls the plug on parts of lower Manhattan, and some Web sites without redundant servers go down.

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Declan McCullagh Former Senior Writer
Declan McCullagh is the chief political correspondent for CNET. You can e-mail him or follow him on Twitter as declanm. Declan previously was a reporter for Time and the Washington bureau chief for Wired and wrote the Taking Liberties section and Other People's Money column for CBS News' Web site.
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Declan McCullagh
NOAA

Power outages caused by Hurricane Sandy show why it's good to have a duplicate Web server located somewhere far away from New York City right now.

The local power company, Consolidated Edison shut down power to portions of lower Manhattan this evening in an effort to prevent damage to underground equipment.

That coincided with when Gawker.com and Gizmodo.com went offline. In a Twitter update at 4:21 p.m. PT, Gizmodo said: "We'll be back soon! There was a data center battery failure after the power went down in Lower Manhattan. Generators powering up."

Buzzfeed.com is also down, saying: "Our site is down. Problems with NY-area servers due to Sandy." Livestream.com says it's experiencing "a major outage."

Nearly 1 million homes and businesses in New York state are without electricity, according to an Associated Press report (here's ConEdison's outage map for the New York City area and another from NSTAR). Power outages in Maryland reportedly topped 145,000 customers.

Here's more information about how to keep tabs on the hurricane's progress.