Oct 30 (Reuters) – Sandy, one of the biggest storms ever to
hit eastern United States, flooded servers of Datagram Inc in
New York City, bringing down several media websites it hosts,
including Huffington Post and Gawker.
“We are continuing to battle flooding and fiber outages in
downtown New York and Connecticut,” a notice posted on
Datagram’s website said.
“Verizon and other carriers in the area are down as
well. Generators are unable to pump fuel due to the flooding in
the basements,” Datagram said.
New York-based Datagram offers server-hosting services,
network and Web application support, and database
administration.
Sandy, which was especially imposing because of its
wide-raging winds, brought a record surge of almost 14 feet (4.2
meters) to downtown Manhattan, well above the previous record of
10 feet (3 meters) during Hurricane Donna in 1960, the National
Weather Service said.
“Due to power outages caused by Superstorm Sandy, our own
website is experiencing technical difficulties,” said Huffington
Post, which is owned by AOL.
All Gawker Media websites, including Gizmodo and Lifehacker,
were down.
“Gawker is temporarily down because the 57th Street Crane
just flooded our servers with sea foam, or something. Back with
you shortly,” Gawker said in a tweet.
BuzzFeed, a fast-growing website known for its quirky
content that spreads quickly online, had gone down earlier but
was back online with limited functionality.
“Elements of BuzzFeed’s site and many story pages are back
online, thanks to a Content Delivery Network, Akamai,
which hosts the content at servers distributed around the
world,” the company said in a post.
MarketWatch website, owned by News Corp, was also
down and cited “technical difficulties.”
Verizon and AT&T; were not immediately available for
comment about outages.
