The trick to running a gossip blog is to reject most of the rumors you get. Otherwise, no one believes anything. You quickly learn to spot the gullible chatter, the obvious attempts to plant a story, the too good to be true. Well, usually. We blew it big three times this year by trying too hard for the scoops.
365 Main, the chain of datacenters whose San Francisco breakdown brought the Web to its knees this summer, is being put on the block by the private-equity funds which own its real estate. Significantly, it doesn't appear that 365 Main Inc., the company which currently runs the centers, will be involved in operations after the sale. Rockwood Properties, which owns a majority of all but one of 365 Main's datacenters, is looking to sell all or some of the centers, which provide space, power, and cooling for servers. No price is set, but the five centers make $68.7 million a year in operating profit — with $18.6 million of that coming from the troubled San Francisco center alone. Frankly, this sounds like a much better business than any of the Web startups hosted by 365 Main. After the jump, the offering document being circulated by Credit Suisse and Eastdil, Rockwood's bankers.
AVN, the porn-industry trade publisher, has at last split with longtime partner AdBrite, which ran an AVN-branded online ad network for adult websites. A new network, run solely by AVN, will launch on December 1. We first noticed the relationship was on the rocks when AVN yanked the AdBrite-run AVNads.com website offline and threw up a hastily built, barely functional site of its own back in August. AdBrite then briefed porn publishers about plans for its own porn-ad network, BlackLabelAds, which was supposed to launch in September, but never did. The two partners patched things up, restoring AdBrite's site. One small problem for AVN, though.
365 Main, the troubled datacenter operator, has finished its investigation into the failure at its San Francisco facility that knocked some of the Internet's most well-known websites, from Craigslist to LiveJournal to Technorati, offline back in July. Ridiculously, the company first tried to blame PG&E for the failure, knowing full well that its clients pay it for reliable power even in a blackout. (Equally ridiculously, I ran a suspect tip that a drunk employee had wreaked havoc in the datacenter.) Now, the company has completely exonerated itself, pinning the blame on a component in its generators. Here's why you still shouldn't believe a word the company says. My analysis, and the company's press release, after the jump.
The upside of that suspect tip I got about what caused Tuesday's massive Internet outages? Tons of tipsters have written in to tell me what they saw on the scene at 365 Main, the troubled San Francisco datacenter whose generators failed during what ought to have been, for the expensively-built facility, a humdrum power outage in the city.
I'm a dunce. I was wrong. There, I said it. In running a tip on Tuesday that a drunk employee brought down 365 Main, the San Francisco datacenter which hosts servers running some of the Web's most important sites, I trusted a source I shouldn't have. Here's the story behind my 365 Main post. A warning to readers of sensitive dispositions — I'm about to take you inside the sausage factory, and it's a bloody mess.
I'm continuing to investigate the story of the outage Tuesday at 365 Main's San Francisco datacenter that brought down some of the most well-known sites on the Internet. Right now, a 365 Main executive is blaming failures at 5 out of its 10 generators. That's right: Fully half of 365 Main's generators failed right as San Francisco experienced a power outage. More to come on this soon, but for now, here's the memo from Marcy Maxwell, 365 Main's head of security.
After killing most of the websites you care about on Tuesday, 365 Main, the troubled datacenter in downtown San Francisco, is back to business. The business of making excuses, that is. Cynthia Harris, the same flack who issued an immaculately timed press release Tuesday morning crowing about how RedEnvelope moved all of its Web operations to 365 Main, only to have them taken down by the outage, is going around telling everyone who will listen that nothing untoward happened. To which any user of Craigslist, Technorati, Six Apart's LiveJournal and TypePad, and AdBrite might respond, rrrrright. Data Center Knowledge has a detailed report. Here's what else I've learned — and why 365 Main's performance remains highly suspicious.
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.
There's a reason most datacenters are located in distant office parks: It's harder for angry customers to line up at your door. And that's what's happening to 365 Main, the downtown-San Francisco datacenter which is suffering a major outage, caused, a tipster says, not by local power fluctuations but by a drunken employee on a bender. (Update: I no longer know whether to trust the source who sent in the tip about a drunk employee.) An eyewitness says that in addition to the customers lining up, bicycle messengers are constantly whizzing by to drop off packages — legal notices, one presumes, informing 365 Main that it has breached customers' service-level agreements. Anyone else on the scene? Drop us a line.
365 Main, a datacenter on the edge of San Francisco's Financial District, is popular with Soma startups for its proximity and its state-of-the-art facilities. Or it used to be, anyway, until a power outage took down sites including Craigslist, Six Apart's TypePad and LiveJournal blogging sites, local listings site Yelp, and blog search engine Technorati. The cause? You won't believe it.
