When the Web Goes Dark

The New Economy remains, of course, very dependent on the Old Economy.

A harsh reminder of that came Tuesday afternoon, when a power failure in San Francisco forced a number of sites including Netflix, Red Envelope, Second Life and Craigslist to go offline.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that equipment failure cut off the electricity to tens of thousands of Pacific Gas and Electric customers-- and even to PG&E itself-- at around 2 p.m. local time. Power was fully restored by 4 p.m.

One of the businesses affected was 365 Main, whose servers are used by a number of San Francisco-based sites.

For a world that is 24/7, even two hours in dark is a major problem.

"It exposed a larger vulnerability," Derek Gordon, an executive at Technorati, which was shut down for about an hour, told the Los Angeles Times. "If this could happen to such a collection of major websites, what would happen if this was part of a major catastrophe? This was sort of a wake-up call."

But this was not the first time. A heat wave in Los Angeles last summer brought down the servers for MySpace for a few hours. The rolling blackouts in California in 2001 played havoc with a number of Web sites based in the state. And there was the 2003 blackout in the Northeast.

With the grid on the nation's populated coasts vulnerable to disruptions, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have been building server farms in the Southeast, Northwest, and Great Plains states, where land is cheap and the power supply is ample.

So a total blackout of the Web is not on the horizon. But what would a crash of the Internet look like?

The Onion provides one hilarious scenario:

Breaking News: All Online Data Lost After Internet Crash

So close those extra browser windows now.

by Jeffrey Cane