Hurricane Sandy Floods Data Centers, Sends BuzzFeed Running to the Cloud

The impact of Hurricane Sandy is being assessed, but some of the damage is immediately visible. It knocked down several websites, as data centers were affected by power outages and sometimes flooding.

Most visibly, BuzzFeed, Gawker and the Huffington Post were all taken down due to problems at their hosting provider, Datagram. 

The Datagram data center remains offline, due to flooding, but BuzzFeed and the Huffington Post have recovered, somewhat.

Countless other websites were affected. The power outages are the main problem, though all data centers have backup power. Data Center Knowledge has a comprehensive list of sites that were affected.

Still, affected websites are recovering. BuzzFeed, for example, is up and running, as it transitioned the entire site to Amazon's Web Services.

The cloud can make it very easy and fast to rent the servers you need and get them up and running. Gawker is running simple blog and the Huffington Post seems to be in full order at this point.