Hurricane Sandy Blows Down Popular Websites

Hurricane Sandy made landfall around New Jersey Monday evening. Before, during, and after the storm, enormous waves and surges caused flooding along the coast. Lower Manhattan was flooded during the storm, causing many popular websites to go down.

Several high-traffic websites went down and continue to be down after massive storm surges from Hurricane Sandy flooded Lower Manhattan in New York City. The websites affected include The Huffington Post (back online as of Tuesday), the websites of the Gawker Media group (Gawker, Deadspin, Jalopnik, Lifehacker), and Buzzfeed. Internet service provider, Datagram, hosts all the websites.

Datagram’s data center and other facilities are located in Manhattan’s financial district, which took much of the flooding. Many other businesses had closed and evacuated employees from designated, “Zone A”, Sunday into Monday as fears of the hurricane making landfall on or around Manhattan mounted. Regardless of the placement of the storm, it caused massive swells and waves that flooded many coastal locations up and down the Eastern Seaboard. Hurricane Irene affected Manhattan in August of 2011, but the flooding happened in a different part of the island and was less severe.

Huffington Post is a news website and content aggregator started by Ariana Huffington in 2005. It hosts a range of writers and contributors in its blog sections and tries to give views of both left-wing and right-wing political standpoints on issues. Since its creation, it has branched into a large media group that spans a broad range of subjects from politics, to music, and even its own humor section.

Gawker media group hosts different topical blogs that are updated regularly each day. Like other aggregators, they get their news from other sources, then write their own take on the topics of the day in a sarcastic, humorous, and sometimes crass manner. Their largest sites are New York City gossip blog, Gawker, sports news blog, Deadspin, and productivity advice blog, Lifehacker.

It is unclear as of now when all the sites will be up and running again, but Gawker has posted minimalist, live blogs until the full websites are back online. Emergency workers are working around the clock in multiple states to assess the damage and account for people’s safety.

Hurricane Sandy was a massive hurricane that ravaged the East Coast, particularly New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania, and New York. The damage created has yet to be tallied by disaster forecasters.