If you're going to San Francisco ...

Many huge internet sites are now getting back to normal after a power outage in San Francisco (where my user photo was taken) took out their power sources yesterday afternoon. Though the outage itself lasted only a couple of hours, it looks like a few sites were offline for six hours or more as their servers were put back online.

Livejournal.com, which is owned by SixApart, appeared to have a lot of trouble. As a blogger there for 5 years, I know that they maintain a separate status page to provide updates in case of server outages or other problems (at http://status.livejournal.org), but that was inaccessible to their staff for much of yesterday's outage. Additionally, LJ was unable to send e-mails to their users alerting them of the problems, as other SixApart sites did, because they used their own servers to store user e-mail addresses.

If you have a few spare hours, it's quite interesting to read the LJ News post with users' reactions to the outage. Because LJ has had several outages before, in addition to encountering a wave of user animosity when they were bought by SixApart, a few thousand users have brought their beef to the comments section. My favorite was from user azurelunatic: "It's excellent that we're up and running in under 24 hours this time. Is this going to be an annual or biannual feature? You know, just to keep the engineers on edge and ensure that the backups had better be working?"

No one's harder to please than bloggers, apparently. :)