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.