Hurricane Sandy Brings Down Many Websites Including Huffington Post, Gawker

Hurricane Sandy bought flooding to New York City that downed the server that hosts several websites, bringing sites like The Huffington Post and Gawker down with it.

The internet outages were caused when Hurricane Sandy flooded the servers of Datagram Inc. in New York City, Reuters reported. Though many of the sites went down late Monday or early Tuesday morning, some still remained out by close to midday Tuesday.

By late Tuesday morning, The Huffington Post was reduced to an update-only site with text and no pictures. A message was displayed at the top of the site alerting readers to the situation:

“Due to power outages caused by Superstorm Sandy, our own website is experiencing technical difficulties.

“We are working around the clock to get the site back to normal. The news team, which has offices around the U.S. and in other countries, is still monitoring everything and will be updating this page with the latest on the storm.”

Datagram noted that it too was working on correcting the internet outages caused by Hurricane Sandy.

“We are continuing to battle flooding and fiber outages in downtown New York and Connecticut,” a notice posted on Datagram’s website said.

“Verizon and other carriers in the area are down as well. Generators are unable to pump fuel due to the flooding in the basements,” Datagram noted.

Hurricane Sandy brought a record storm surge of almost 14 feet to downtown Manhattan, crushing the previous record of 10 feet set during Hurricane Donna in 1960.

Hurricane Sandy also brought down all Gawker Media websites including Gizmodo, Jezebel, and Lifehacker.

“Gawker is temporarily down because the 57th Street Crane just flooded our servers with sea foam, or something. Back with you shortly,” Gawker said in a tweet.

Other websites were down briefly during the Hurricane Sandy internet outage. Buzzfeed had gone down earlier, but the site was able to bring many pages back online “thanks to a Content Delivery Network, Akamai, which hosts the content at servers distributed around the world,” the company said in a post.