The last few days of wild weather in the United States has come to a head as Hurricane Sandy reached the East Coast. In addition to widespread flooding, destructive winds and torrential rainfall, Sandy has taken down the Datagram data center in New York.
According to an official statement, released on the Datagram website October 29, 2012, "Datagram had thoroughly tested its emergency systems at 33 Whitehall, NYC and was fully staffed awaiting the storm to hit Manhattan's shores. Once ConEd lost power to Lower Manhattan, Datagram's emergency systems kicked on maintaining power to Datagram's datacenter. Unfortunately, within a couple hours of the storm hitting Manhattan's shores, the building's entire basement, which houses the building's fuel tank pumps and sub pumps, was inundated with water taking the building generator system offline - essentially shutting down the entire building."
At the time of this writing, the flooding has taken several well-known sites offline, including Gawker, Buzzfeed, Gizmodo, Lifehacker and Mediate. Gizmodo, Lifehacker and Gawker are now operating in emergency storm mode, posting frequent storm photos and updates, but not covering their usual topics.
While the data center remains flooded, Datagram has indicated they will be switching to generator power soon.
Not alone in outages, a Data Center Knowledge report also shows others like Peer 1 and Internap being impacted by outages.