Planet Explosion Not Connected to Itchy Cows

I’ve been encountering a lot of network outages this morning -- like a lot -- and really got the feeling something was wrong. A lot of my usual stops are down today. And even many of the ones that aren’t seemed a bit pokey.

I went and did a bit of digging and decided to share the results with you, in case you’ve been noticing the same thing. Web Host Industry News posted this less than an hour ago:

Dedicated hosting provider The Planet (theplanet.com) suffered an explosion, 4:55 pm CST on Saturday at its H1 data center in Houston, Texas, which led to an outage that affected approximately 9,000 servers and 7,500 customers.

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The explosion and accompanying fire knocked down three walls surrounding the facility's electrical equipment room, as well as destroyed the underground cabling that powers the first floor of the facility. Fortunately, there were no injuries, nor were any servers damaged or lost.

So, yikes! An explosion affecting 9000 servers? Yup: that’s gonna have an impact.

It should be noted that these network outages have nothing to do with the herd of itchy cows that have caused power outages in Wales. (That’s a total relief, right?)