DaniWeb survives Sandy but Gawker, Gizmodo and Assassins’ Creed 3 go down

Updated happygeek 3 Tallied Votes 492 Views Share

I am pleased to report that DaniWeb, based about half an hour outside Manhattan in Uniondale, Long Island, New York has survived Hurricane Sandy. There were no downtimes or outages, and all staff are OK. Not everyone in the tech space has been so lucky it would seem.

sandymap

Four big online names have suffered outages after Datagram, a web hosting and data center outfit based in Manhattan, lost power.

Buzzfeed, Gawker, Gizmodo and The Huffington Post were amongst the sites impacted by the power loss after Datagram experienced flooding to the basement of its building last night.

Intermap, another New York based data center, also experienced flooding. An email to customers advised that the sub-basement at Intermap's LGA11 facility on Broad Street was experiencing flooding that had destroyed the diesel pumps providing fuel to generators and emergency fuel supplies would be expired within a few hours.

Meanwhile, New York gamers hoping to hanker down with a copy of Assassin's Creed 3 were out of luck after Gamestop battened down the hatches and cancelled all the Northeastern US midnight launches. Gamestop says that all stores will remain closed until it is safe to re-open them. An official post on social media sites urged "safety and peace, Assassins.”

You can check out the progress of Sandy using the which uses Google's new Public Alerts system on Google Maps. The Crisis Map shows summaries of power outage information at a click, as well as more general real time storm tracking and forecasting.

Our thoughts here at DaniWeb are with the families of the 13 people who have died overnight.

If you have been hit by Hurricane Sandy please let us know how you got on. Did you experience any tech outages, or was technology your vital link to the world as the storm passed by?

Dani AI

Generated

The first-hand update from , and the short follow-ups by and , make this thread a useful reminder: weather-driven outages expose predictable weak points. Below is a compact, practical checklist of resilience steps and cautions that remain relevant years later.

Checklist for operators and hosting teams:

  • Architectural redundancy: replicate critical services and data across physically separate regions and independent carriers; avoid single-location dependencies.
  • DNS and failover planning: keep an emergency DNS plan and test it. A modest TTL (for example, 300 seconds) is useful during drills, but never flip production DNS without rehearsal.
  • CDN and static fallback: host a cached public status page and static assets on an independent CDN or object storage in another region so basic information stays online when origin systems fail.
  • Health checks and runbooks: pair automated health probes with clear runbooks and human approval gates to avoid faulty automation causing wider disruption.
  • Backups and recovery tests: verify offsite backups and perform periodic restores; treat a successful restore as the real test of recovery readiness.
  • Communication playbook: keep prewritten status templates, an independently hosted status page, and a small roster of pre-authorized staff who can make emergency infra or DNS changes.
  • Physical-site hardening: for colos or on-prem sites, ensure generators, transfer switches and fuel arrangements are above flood risk, tested regularly, and monitored remotely.
  • Post-incident discipline: produce a short post-mortem with concrete remediation items and tracked ownership.

A final caution: resilience features are only useful if practiced. Regular, scoped drills — not just tabletop discussions — surface hidden assumptions and reduce panic during real events. This set of steps is intended to turn a disruptive incident into structured improvements rather than repeated surprises.

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Member #949455

Buzzfeed, Gawker, Gizmodo and The Huffington Post were amongst the sites impacted by the power loss after Datagram experienced flooding to the basement of its building last night.

I haven't forgot about the storm.

An official post on social media sites urged "safety and peace, Assassins.”

I saw that.

BigPaw 17 Master Poster

When I saw this post I thought Sandy was still alive and kicking up companies... :-D

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