Westserve

LA Power Outage Bring Down Millions of Web Sites

If you had tried to access this site early yesterday (Tuesday) Sydney time, or any one of over a million websites hosted from just a single building in Los Angeles, you would have been out of luck.

The massive power cut in L.A. yesterday was the main culprit, but the real fun happened in the huge building that houses the servers that host Westserve and over a million other domains. Here’s a run down of the problems that Dreamhost and other hosting companies faced.

So, in spite of four backup generator systems, huge UPS’s and the like, simple human error was to blame. As frustrating as it was, it’s kind of comforting to know that plain old sin was behind it all!

For all the people hosting with me, stay tuned for news of a status report email and web page system that will let you know if anything like this happens again (which it probably will!).