Tech & Biz

Vancouver blackout crashes websites worldwide

by Rob Peters | July 14, 2008 at 04:03 pm

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Today's power outage in Vancouver has had an impact on business both within the city and far beyond.

Hundreds of Internet servers at Vancouver's Harbour Centre lost power, and as a result, websites crashed worldwide. Internet provider Peer 1, for example, had many of their clients' pages go down (progress updates can be found in their forums here).

Meanwhile, the Vancouver Business Improvement Association said the outage cost local businesses "millions" in lost productivity.

A quick scan of Vancouver Twitterers showed a lot of people enjoying a Monday off (or not enjoying it, if they were management).

Several hundred Internet servers at Vancouver's Harbour Centre also lost power, said Martin Robson of Robson Communications Inc. That means many corporate websites - including BC Ferries' site - were down.

"We have over 200 servers located at Harbour Centre and they're off-line as a result of the power outage," Robson said. "A huge number of companies (are) off-line."

Many of those organizations affected weren't even located in Vancouver.

Worldwide Christian Schools, an organization based in Michigan, said its website had been affected by the power outage because its websites are hosted by a Vancouver-based Internet company.

"All three of our websites have been down for hours," Emily Klooster, a spokeswoman with the organization, wrote in an e-mail.

"The effects of this power outage have gone far beyond Vancouver."

Nancy Berton, owner of Gardecor Inc., a Colorado-based outdoor products company, said its websites were also down due to the Vancouver outage.

"This is a major economic loss for the day in sales as we are in our peak season," Berton wrote in an e-mail.

BC Hydro said the outage is affecting about 4,400 customers. However, some of those customers are large office towers, so the number of offices affected was believed to be much greater.

A power outage in Vancouver is taking a huge hit on some in the domain industry today. Domain Name News noticed that Name Administration parking sites were not resolving earlier today at around 1pm CST. The many domains owned by the company such as ceilingfans.com and personalloans.com were still unreachable at the time of this writing.

Name Administration and many large sites in the Vancouver area use Internet provider Peer 1. Early today when we noticed the pages down, our technical staff traced back the outage to Peer 1.