The Planet Explodes

[Chris]

From Doug Erwin:
This evening at 4:55pm CDT in our H1 data center, electrical gear shorted, creating an explosion and fire that knocked down three walls surrounding our electrical equipment room. Thankfully, no one was injured. In addition, no customer servers were damaged or lost.

We have just been allowed into the building to physically inspect the damage. Early indications are that the short was in a high-volume wire conduit. We were not allowed to activate our backup generator plan based on instructions from the fire department.

This is a significant outage, impacting approximately 9,000 servers and 7,500 customers. All members of our support team are in, and all vendors who supply us with data center equipment are on site. Our initial assessment, although early, points to being able to have some service restored by mid-afternoon on Sunday. Rest assured we are working around the clock.

We are in the process of communicating with all affected customers. we are planning to post updates every hour via our forum and in our customer portal. Our interactive voice response system is updating customers as well.

There is no impact in any of our other five data centers.

I am sorry that this accident has occurred and I apologize for the impact.

Good news: None of my servers were there.

Bad news: Some of my sites used nameservers that WERE there.

[allout]

Wow that sucks, it did not affect my sites but I have a few sites I use that were affected. It sure does show how vulnerable the Internet still can be.

[webcs]

Think we had a customer convert over when that happened. Fortunately he had a backup and got him bakcup, but we did hear about the extreme damage over there. WOW.

[KLB]

Wow! I was expecting the thread title to be a metaphor. Even the best redundancy plans have an achilles heal and I suppose it would be hard to keep operating after an explosion like this.