You may have noticed that Playak has been off the wire for a couple of days. There has been a huge explosion in the data center in Houston, Texas, which destroyed the power supply for the whole data center. The official message I received from Texas on Sunday read:

"
On Saturday, May 31st 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.
"

Approximately 9000 web servers were affected by the explosion, so a huge team has been working around the clock to get everything back online. There wasn't much I could do from my end to speed things up.

I'm glad that nobody was hurt, and I'm glad we're back now. As you can imagine, reparing this sort of damage is a massive undertaking, so I wouldn't be surprised to see a couple more interruptions dring the next few days.

Just thought I should inform you all about what happened and apoligize for the interruption.

Jeroen

Glad Playak itself was not lost either...

Another site that I follow must be hosted in the same data centre as they were having the same problem.

Glad to see you back!

David J.