This evening at 4:55pm CDT in our H1 data center, electrical gear shorted, creating an explosion and fire that knocked down three walls surrounding our electrical equipment room. Thankfully, no one was injured. In addition, no customer servers were damaged or lost.

We have just been allowed into the building to physically inspect the damage. Early indications are that the short was in a high-volume wire conduit. We were not allowed to activate our backup generator plan based on instructions from the fire department.

This is a significant outage, impacting approximately 9,000 servers and 7,500 customers. All members of our support team are in, and all vendors who supply us with data center equipment are on site. Our initial assessment, although early, points to being able to have some service restored by mid-afternoon on Sunday. Rest assured we are working around the clock.

We are in the process of communicating with all affected customers. we are planning to post updates every hour via our forum and in our customer portal. Our interactive voice response system is updating customers as well.

There is no impact in any of our other five data centers.

I am sorry that this accident has occurred and I apologize for the impact.

I just chatted with a buddy who was onsite during the supposedly 'electrical' fire, and said everything was business as normal.

Chat Log:
[Sunday June 01 2008 - 14:48:47] the whole thing with TP
[Sunday June 01 2008 - 14:48:51] is really fishy
[Sunday June 01 2008 - 14:49:12] i was there last night
[Sunday June 01 2008 - 14:49:17] and there was no trucks
[Sunday June 01 2008 - 14:49:21] no nothing
[Sunday June 01 2008 - 14:49:30] no electricians
[Sunday June 01 2008 - 14:49:58] so either they renamed the spring tx location tohouston 1
[Sunday June 01 2008 - 14:50:03] or nothing happened
[Sunday June 01 2008 - 14:55:07] the msg from Doug came at 11PM
[Sunday June 01 2008 - 14:55:18] i was there at 2 AM and everything was fine
[Sunday June 01 2008 - 14:55:23] and stuff is still not back.

He thinks there might have been a search warrant for servers, and they are using an electrical outage as a 'cover' story to hide the real truth of what happened.

I am sure you have all been there by now, but he redirected the name servers to a blog he set up for now. He is hosted from the Texas data center.

There is even a few other rumors floating around about the down time. Check out this post from a major news site....

A search warrant for servers? What does that mean?