Fragilities of the infrastructure.

internet, web hosting, infrastructure

So I’m coming home tonight, my computer waiting with several LiveJournal tabs open in the browser. I want to continue where I left off, but each click brings me a 404 Page Not Found error. Is LJ down? I move on to Technorati to search for “LiveJournal down”, but only get sluggishly appearing off-topic responses.

I seriously start to wonder if there is something weird going on with my network, but IRC, IM, email, and several web sites actually work (among which, my own — or at least those not on LJ). Finally, a kind soul on IRC points me in the right direction: a power outage in San Francisco (affecting about 25,000 inhabitants) power outage in San Francisco has also brought down a data center apparently favoured by quite a number of the known Silicon Valley names — and apparently redundancy and backup plans failed.

Now on a larger scale this is no catastrophe. The internet isn’t down, and we’re nowhere close to Cory Doctorow’s When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth. But it feels as if too many eggs were being put in the same basket here right now.

(Strange, by the way, that the articles I’ve seen about the power outage fail to mention any reason, unlike any I’m used to from European news reporting about such things. The origins of the problems they’re having in Gloucester at the moment, including at the UK web hoster Fasthosts, are entirely clear — there’s been heavy flooding in large parts of England over the last days and weeks.)

chris @ July 24, 2007