Avis Ward

San Francisco Power Outage affected Craiglist and Other Internet Servers



Posted: Tuesday, July 24, 2007

by
GeoVi's Home for Pregnant Teens

The San Francisco Chronicle reported between 30,000 and 50,000 Pacific Gas and Electric Co. customers in San Francisco and the northern Peninsula lost power for several hours this afternoon after what witnesses described as an explosion under a manhole cover on Mission Street, the utility said.

Brian Swanson, a spokesman for the utility, said power failures were reported throughout wide swaths of the east side of San Francisco, including downtown and at PG & E's own office on Beale Street near the Ferry Building.

The outage first occurred at about 1:50 p.m., and electricity flickered on and off at least five times before power was restored at about 4 p.m.

PG & E officials said the source of the power outage was an underground failure. Standing at a manhole in a plaza at 560 Mission St. in San Francisco, where witnesses reported hearing an explosion, Swanson said it could have been the source of the outage, but officials were still investigating.

The incident recalled an August 2005 explosion in an underground vault at Post and Kearny streets that critically injured a woman who was walking by. At the time, PG & E blamed high levels of moisture in the attached high-voltage chambers and said it was checking the safety of about 1,000 other high-voltage chambers.

Swanson said today's incident -- in which no one was injured -- was caused by some sort of fault in the line and completely unrelated to the incident two years ago.

The outage affected an important list of Internet servers including Netflix, Craiglist, TypePad, Cnet, Technorati, Livejournal, Yelp, VOX, Six Apart etc. etc. etc. This explains why you may have been unable to get to some websites earlier.

On a side note, Netflix doesn’t need additional troubles while they fight competitor, Blockbuster. Netflix’s stock has dropped since Blockbuster began offering exchanges of movies at their retail outlets. The fight between these two is not attractive these days.

2007 by Avis Ward

Avis is founder of El Elyon Outpouring Center, an Empowerment Outreach Ministry emphasizing God’s Unconditional Love and Grace and GeoVi’s Home for New Life, a nonprofit providing faith, hope, and love to teens, pregnant teens and their babies. She's CEO of Providential Coaching, a Christian Life coaching practice teaching young women how-to turn within for divine direction to learn and follow the plan God has for their lives. She's the host and creator of Devoted Housewives in the House of God, an Internet Radio Talk Show. Speaker, Seminar Leader and an Ambassador of Love. Avis respectfully acknowledges her deceased parents as her role models, and the hero and heroine in her life.
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