Datagram Goes Down After Hurricane-Related Floods in NYC

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Datagram, an Internet service provider, went down this week after flooding from Hurricane Sandy reached its servers in the company’s New York City offices.

When the company went down, customers such as Gawker, Huffington Post and BuzzFeed went down quickly after.

"Unfortunately, within a couple hours of the storm hitting Manhattan's shores, the building's entire basement, which houses the building's fuel tank pumps and sump pumps, was completely filled with water and a few feet into the lobby," Datagram said in a statement. "Due to electrical systems being underwater, the building was forced to shut down to avoid fire and permanent damage."

“Our Bethel, Connecticut facility is online and functioning normally,” Datagram said on Wednesday.

The company explained it lost power due to the outage from Consolidated Edison in New York City. Its infrastructure was not damaged from the storm.

“We have been working closely with the city [of New York], Con-Ed and building engineers to clear the water from the basement so that we may restore our emergency power systems,” the company announced.

The company said it is awaiting word from the utility company. Roll up generators are not being allowed in the area around its offices until water is removed and Con-Ed gives the all-clear, the company said.

Meanwhile, Gawker found an option to allow its service to get back online.

"While we're obviously disappointed with Datagram, our priority has been getting back online for our readers with an alternate publishing platform, which we've now done with all sites, thanks to Tumblr," Scott Kidder, Gawker's executive director, Operations, told ABC News.

BuzzFeed also recovered its full site. "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," BuzzFeed said on its website.

After Hurricane Irene last year, BuzzFeed had employed an offsite data center to replicate everything, ABC News said. BuzzFeed also uses Akamai to cache content.

In addition, The Huffington Post used a back-up server in Newark, NJ. "Between Monday night and Tuesday morning, HuffPost was accessible via a temporary site – status.huffingtonpost.com – and writers and editors relied on Tumblr, Facebook and Twitter to post stories and information during the storm," The Huffington Post said.

Also, MarketWatch also went down due "technical difficulties," the source added.

The storm led to almost 14 feet in a surge in lower Manhattan, where Datagram is located.

Meanwhile, in New York City Con-Ed said that as of Tuesday, some 800,000 customers in New York City and nearby Westchester County had no power, according to TechZone360.

Approximately 200,000 of these customers lost power after an explosion at a substation on 13th Street in Manhattan, according to The Wall Street Journal.




Edited by Braden Becker
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