Hurricane Sandy hit the US East Coast yesterday afternoon, causing damage to data centres and taking websites offline.
Web publishers the Huffington Post, Gawker and BuzzFeed suffered website outages as their data centre hosting provider, Datagram, battled flooding and fibre outages at its New York and Connecticut facilties. website.
“Verizon and other carriers in the area are down as well. Generators are unable pump fuel due the flooding the basements,” Datagram said on its website. “Downed trees are causing fiber outages all across the northeast.”
Cloud storage provider Nirvanix offered customers located in its New Jersey data centre to move it to other locations within its cloud storage network, such as the US, Frankfurt or Tokyo, either on a temporary or full-time basis, free of charge.
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According to a report by the Denver Post, CoreSite, which operates in-between 300,000 and 400,000 square feet of data centres in the path of the cyclone, sent five employees to the area to ensure that the buildings stayed online.
New York power company Consolidated Edison said on Monday it had shut down electrical services to 28,200 customers in Brooklyn to protect both company and electrical equipment.
On Tuesday, the power company said that more than 650,000 customers in New York and Westchester County lost electrical power due to the hurricane, leaving an estimated total of one million people without power.
