Web Hit By San Francisco Power Crash Tuesday

There’s a lesson to be learned from the incident – one that was felt ‘round the world – that occurred in San Francisco on July 24th: Drunks can be dangerous.

Actually, there’s no real hard evidence that a data center employee, supposedly under the influence, who, according to Valleyway, was said to have turned maniacal, was responsible for taking down many popular sites on the Web, because, well, frankly much of the San Francisco as a whole experienced downtime. But, you know, rumors are more exciting, so we’ll keep the one involving a boozer on the back burner just for funzies.

In all seriousness, the power outage, whoever/whatever the responsible party (or parties) for its occurrence might be, was a whopper. Currents to 365 Main, a datacenter based in SF's Financial District popular with startups to well-established domains – Craigslist, Technorati, Yelp, and Six Apart all rely on the SF-based complex to stay online in beautifully redundant fashion – ceased to flow, though only for about 2 hours’ time.

This just goes to show that even the most resilient of Web institutions can’t get nowhere without a steady supply of juice.

Alright, I admit this story has little to do directly with things happening in Web 2.0. But because it involves a utility company – in this case, Pacific Gas & Electric – which keeps a significant number of Web entities big and small up and running, it seems to me this bit of news is very relevant to what we cover here at Profy.

Besides, you know and I know that if the tale of the intoxicated destructor really did turn out to be true, none of us would care how pertinent or impertinent it was. We’d enjoy it anyway.

All in all, things are fine again in Web 2.0 land. Blogs on Typepad (a Six Apart platform) are carrying on as usual. Searches of those blogs continue on Technorati. Job positions for bloggers are being posted on Craigslist once again. And so and so forth. Everything’s back to normal. So why are you still reading this post? Why am I still writing it?