Ahh, Valleywag demonstrates one more time that they’ll print any damn thing sent to them without any care whatsoever about whether or not such a thing is true or not.

First of all, if an employee wanted to take down a datacenter, they wouldn’t need to “f___ up a lot of stuff” to do it.

There’s a big red button right by the door in every data center I’ve been to. It’s an emergency power off button. It has a huge sign next to it saying that if you push it without cause you’ll be prosecuted. Why? Cause it turns off the power to everything in the datacenter. Doing that would require admins to spend hours bringing back up their equipment (like it took today).

But it’s ridiculous to say that someone could “mess up” a rack. These things are all bolted to the floor — if they weren’t a small earthquake would cause major heck. A single human being could NOT push them over, even if you were using all of your weight.

Even if someone were able to push over a rack, it hardly would take out the entire datacenter, either. And, most employees who get access to datacenters don’t have access to racks anyway. In every colo center I’ve been in (three different ones in my career) all the machines are inside locked cages. So, how would an employee get access to a cage to do enough damage to bring down at least six companies? Hint: they couldn’t.

I gotta get myself a fake email address so I can send bulls**t into Valleywag and get it printed. Jason Calacanis told me about how he got free publicity for Mahalo that way.

Anyway, I love Valleywag. The stuff that people get printed there is *funny.* Just don’t confuse it for the truth.

San Francisco’s 365 Main datacenter went down with a power outage, which knocked off Six Apart, Technorati, and Craigslist, among others. O’Reilly’s Radar is tracking the situation. This might have something to do with the Netflix datacenter having trouble too.

What I wonder is just how did this happen? Datacenters usually have their own power systems and backups (the ones I’ve been in have both huge uninterrupted power supplies which are literally huge batteries as well as generators that they can fire up if it looks like power won’t come back on soon). Sounds like someone really screwed up, or, the infrastructure isn’t being paid attention to — both of which are bad for the tech industry. This is especially bad for a datacenter that is located miles from two major earthquake faults. If we have a big earthquake here it’s conceivable that power would be out for days if the right lines got cut.

Yikes. Reading the blogs Netflix has been down for 12 hours so far. Add in a bad day for Netflix on Wall Street (they reported first drop in subscribers) and I’m glad I’m not an executive there today.