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We've now learned more about the outage at 365 Main's San Francisco datacenter that knocked some of the Web's most popular sites offline. The latest theory: An employee, reportedly drunk, hit the emergency-power-off switch in 365 Main's Colo 4 room. (Update: I no longer know whether to trust the source who sent in the tip about a drunk employee.) Other sites located in other rooms were unaffected. This isn't the first time 365 Main has suffered an EPO-induced outage; a major one still remembered by customers occurred back in April 2005, and another took place last year. After the jump, a gallery of the carnage caused, and a roundup of reactions.

Some of the affected websites — most of which are back online — played it straight with customers, like Craigslist. Others offered the usual pack of lies websites trot out. AdBrite, for example, tried to claim that the outage was due to "scheduled maintenance," and RedEnvelope, the e-commerce gifts site which just today crowed about moving all of its Web operations to 365 Main, said the outage was a systems upgrade. Busted!