What Do Gawker and Gizmodo Have in Common

      As you know the Middlesex North Registry of Deeds reduced its hours of operation on Monday and Tuesday of this week due to Hurricane Sandy. Fortunately, we are back up and running with normal business hours. Obviously, the registry was just one of many, many operations along the East Coast whose services were interrupted doing the two day storm.

     According to an article in this morning's New York Times the meg-storm knocked out a few of the country's most popular websites. Sandy darkened "Gawker", "Jezebel", "Gizmodo", "The Huffington Post" and "Buzzfeed".

     Shortly after hurricane winds hit land Monday all of these frequently visited sites went down.

     Why would these frequently visited sites be crippled at approximately the same time?

     Simple...these websites all share the same hosting company called Datagram...and Datagram is located in Lower Manhattan.  And we all know Sandy caused major damage in New York knocking out power in wide spread areas
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     As you would expect, Datagram has backup generators that are used during emergencies that cause loss of power. But Hurricane Sandy flooded Datagram's generator room killing this alternative source of power also.

    A few minutes ago (October 31, 10:15AM) I visited Gawker, Gizmodo and Jezebel and this is the message posted on the front pages of these websites:

Our New York City data center is still offline thanks to Hurricane Sandy.

We are working as quickly as possible to restore the full site.