InstaOutage for NAC

A power outage at the Parsippany, NJ data center of Net Access Corporation took a fair portion of the "Blogosphere" offline for much of yesterday. Among the casualties was InstaPundit, the standardbearer for the weblog sector. Instapundit author Glenn Reynolds was able to post to an InstaBackup blog he maintains at BlogSpot for just such an emergency. Not so lucky were customers of several hosting providers housed at NAC that are widely used by Bloggers, including Hosting Matters and Blogomania. The outage lasted 12 hours for some of Hosting Matters' servers, according to the company's customer support forum. So what happened?

Net Access posted an explanation of the event on its website. While some affected customers used the word "fire" in explaining the outage to their readers, NAC described a "component failure" at the Parsippany data center at 10:20 am.

"We had no warning of this failure, and we are currently investigating the cause," NAC said. "This failure triggered the fire alarms and the fire suppression system, and caused the UPS unit to drop all power to (the data center). In addition, because this failure caused the fire alarms to be set off, the entire building had to be evacuated while the fire department investigated. NAC personnel worked with the fire department to ensure the building environment was safe to re-enter."

Because of the way news bounces around weblogs, the outage became widely discussed on the Net. I encountered it being discussed on several of the blogs I read daily.

I'll admit to being badly bitten by the blogging bug, which means that my Web reading has expanded beyond the usual insane number of sites I read each day. Alas, it's not just reading, either. In addition to authoring the Wired Space blog you're reading now, I pen a number of personal blogs, including Technosponge.