Network Outage at UnitedLayer
It seems that the storm slamming the Bay Area also affected the co-location facility UnitedLayer. A power “glitch” in their building brought down one of their big UPS units. This caused power outage to all of their network equipment. When their routers restarted, they were not serving external traffic. And their backup routers also failed.
We were notified of the PLoS website outages at 7:22am. We could not connect to any PLoS servers which meant a network problem occurred at the co-location facility UnitedLayer. A phone call confirmed the worst and we set about trying to get backup environment running on Amazon EC2 (“the cloud”). We redirected PLoS ONE to an instance that was already running but the site was too slow to be useful. We redirected website traffic to the everyONE blog. UnitedLayer fixed their network issues at 10:30am. We switched the redirects back and the journals websites are back online.