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A sudden power outage has knocked millions of Six Apart Ltd.s LiveJournal blogs offline.
The power failure occurred on Friday evening at the Internap data center affected more than 100 servers that keep LiveJournals blogging network up and running.
“LiveJournal is currently completely inaccessible, and were waiting on Internap for an estimate when power will be restored. Once power is restored, the service will be brought back up slowly so that we can ensure data integrity,” Six Apart said in a notice. “Well [provide an] update with an estimate for when the service will be brought back up once we hear back from Internap.”
On the LiveJournal site, visitors are being directed to an powerloss update page that provides more information on the battle to get the 5.6 million blogs back online.
“The worst thing we could do right now is rush the site up in an unreliable state. Were checking all the hardware and data, making sure everythings consistent. Where its not, well be restoring from recent backups and replaying all the changes since that time, to get to the current point in time, but in good shape,” the update notice read. “For now, please be patient. Well be working all weekend on this if we have to.”
“Were going to be buying a bunch of rack-mount UPS units on Monday so this doesnt happen again,” the company added.
Six Aparts TypePad hosted service was not affected by the outage.
The power outage comes less than two weeks after Six Aparts acquisition of LiveJournal and underscores the challenges that start-ups face when trying to scale hosted services.
In 2002, malicious hackers broke into FTP servers owned by Pyra Labs blogger service and forced the company to shut down hosted blogs for several hours. Blogger has since been acquired by Google Inc.