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.