The View From Wisconsin

So, there's an electrical fire in an office building in Houston. Unless you're actually in the building at the time, it's not a major issue.

Or is it?

See, the building happens to be the home of The Planet, a web server company. Their servers are all housed in this building, and when the fire disrupts power to the servers... oops.

Now, it shouldn't be too difficult for things to recover, right? Normally, this would be the case. However, this happened on a Saturday night. Getting people in to try to get power restored and get the servers back up and running is a long and tiring task.

So what in the heck does this have to do with you, me or that plant in the next cubicle? Well, The Planet happens to be a pretty wide-ranging "server farm"; they host a lot of different websites and portals in their stacks.

Including one for a certain webcomic portal known as Blank Label Comics. The entire BLC website and forums have been mostly off-line since Saturday. They anticipate being back up by today (Monday), but who knows what kind of condition the servers will be in once they're back up.

One piece of faulty wiring leading to a web-based catastrophe. Almost as ridiculous as a butterfly's wings causing Hurricane Katrina.