Hurricane Sandy, the massive storm that battered the Northeast yesterday, is estimated to have an estimated cost of about $20 billion worth of damage. Power is out for millions, known deaths are in the double digits (and likely to rise sharply after things calm down), public transportation is disrupted on an unprecedented level, the U.S. Stock market is closed for the second day (the first time that it has ever done so for a weather-related reason), and ports were impacted, meaning that products shipped to the busy New York/New Jersey shipyards have not made it to the US.
Some shipments will be delivered direct to store parking lots, still in cargo holds. (Photo/ABCNews )
What most were not expecting was for Sandy to take down the internet. Yet once the waters surged up above lower N.Y., it was bound to happen. Many data centers are in the NY/NJ area. For example, Datagram’s server room flooded, taking down Buzzfeed, Huffinton Post, Gawker, and others. All of the servers websites are now back up, but for those who were following the storm via those services, that had to be a pretty scary moment. Also, if you used Amazon’s cloud servers, your best bet was apparently to pray. A freelance service technician I know had this to say:
“Work platforms for technicians, such as OnForce, FieldNation, and FieldSolutions, have had spotty service throughout yesterday and last night. They all use AWS. Makes it hard for me to find out about my work schedules and dispatch queues. Finding work isn’t going to happen if the sites are down.
On the plus side for techs like me, there will be good storm clean-up work in the next few weeks.”
At various points during the storm, major media houses were impacted. Even those with redundant servers (which everyone should have) were hit, as some of those backups are across the river in the also storm-battered state of New Jersey.
No, Atlantic City is not supposed to look like Venice, and this picture was taken before landfall. (AFP PHOTO/Stan HONDASTAN HONDA/AFP/Getty Images via Denver Post)
Fortunately, Facebook and Twitter weathered the storm, and you can trust your friends to share tons of almost certainly fake storm photo or barrage you with why this would be so much worse/better if the candidate they like was not/was in charge.
Its fun looking at the graphs of some data collection agencies, where theres this massive drop in states where the hadoop clusters went down