Tenants of the Fisher Plaza data center carry servers out of the building Friday morning. The building houses the Bing Travel servers, among others.
(Credit: TechFlash )Update at 3:30 p.m. PDT July 4: Power was restored to Fisher Plaza early Saturday morning with back-up generators, and many sites are back online, including Bing Travel, according to TechFlash.
Update at 4:51 p.m. PDT July 3 The fire's start time and a statement from Fisher Communications were added.
An electrical fire at downtown Seattle's Fisher Plaza has interrupted service at a long roster of Web sites, including Microsoft's Bing Travel and Authorize.net.
Fisher Communications said in statement Friday that the problems at the Fisher Plaza data center started in a garage-level electrical room at approximately 11:10 p.m. Thursday night. Fisher said the cause of the fire remains under investigation.
Some of the affected sites put up messages explaining what had happened. "The blown transformer knocked out power to the entire building, which is home to the Bing Travel servers," a message on Bing Travel said. "This is isolated to Bing Travel only, and there is no impact to any other aspect of Bing."
Bing Travel said it's working hard to restore service, and set 5 p.m. PDT Friday as the target time for resumption of service (it did not meet that goal). "In the meantime, you may use Microsoft travel partner Orbitz for your travel needs," the site said.
TechFlash reporter Todd Bishop has arrived on the scene and is posting updates.
Bishop notes that this isn't the first outage at the Fisher Plaza data center--service went offline last year as well after an electrical fire. The Fisher Plaza Web site also was down as of this writing, but a cached version says:
Fisher Plaza is the only mission-critical business community in the Northwest combining Class A office, data center, colocation, and retail space with 21st century communications and media services.
"Pretty frustrating," writes one TechFlash poster. "I understand problems happen, but this the second time in a year that we have had to explain to our customers about an outage. This is supposed to be a 'world class' facility. Brings up a lot of questions that are still unanswered from the last outage."
Among other sites impacted--see Kyle Mulka's blog for a list of affected sites and their current status--online real estate service Redfin suffered an outage last night, but was back up Friday morning, according to TechFlash. Fisher Plaza is also home to Seattle's KOMO-TV and KOMONews.com, which reports that the server farm fire also impacted television and radio broadcasts. As a result, KOMO Radio and KOMO-TV are broadcasting Friday from remote locations.
Verizon Communications spokesman Jon Davies said the fire also temporarily disrupted Verizon's Seattle-area DSL service. About 50,000 customers in Oregon and Washington lost Internet connectivity, Davies told TechFlash.
On Friday afternoon, Fisher said it's bringing in electrical generators to restore power to the building, at which time it can further assess the situation. "The company is working to restore normal service to its customers as soon as possible," Fisher said.
MotherJones was yet another site taken down by the fire. Others: Big Fish Games, Dotster, Tom's of Maine.
Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)Updated 12:20 p.m. PST with new comment from Google and the North Carolina Department of Commerce.
As a result of uncertain plans for data center expansion, Google has turned down a $4.7 million economic development grant from North Carolina that would have funded computer facility plans in Lenoir, N.C.
"The company's ramp-up forecasts for its Lenoir project always have been sensitive to a variety of factors that are difficult to accurately predict. Recent volatile economic conditions make business planning even more difficult," Google said in a letter to North Caroline Commerce Secretary James Fain III in which the company withdrew from the grant program.
Google spokesman Eitan Bencuya added that the company didn't want to be tied to a specific timeline or metrics.
Getting the funding through the Job Development and Investment Grant program would have been contingent on meeting specific milestones outlined in the plan, state Commerce Department spokeswoman Kathy Neal said. Although Google withdrew from the JDIG program, "They are still continuing with their investment, initially estimated at $600 million," she said.
Google has been tightening its belt as its days of rapid revenue growth come to an end, and the recession and economic crisis come to the fore.
Google was awarded the grant in 2007 for creating 210 jobs and spending $600 million over four years as a result of the data center in Lenoir, N.C., according to a story in the Triangle Business Journal. But the Internet giant withdrew its application Thursday after establishing one data center building with 50 employees and only the shell of a second, according to the report.
But Bencuya said building the shell and leaving it empty until needed has always been Google's plan. And the company is still building the data center, even if it's giving itself more wiggle room about the schedule.
"This decision does not, in any way, impact the operation of our data center in Lenoir, our commitments to the Caldwell County community, or the jobs of those who are currently employed at the data center," Google said in a statement. "We fully expect to achieve employment and capital investment levels that are consistent with those that the state announced back in 2007."
There are other incentives such as tax breaks for the Google facility, too, according to a report in the News & Observer. Bencuya didn't share specifics, but he said the $4.7 million grant was a minor component of the overall incentives.
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