A couple of months ago, one of Rackspace’s data centers ran into trouble when a truck crashed into a power transformer and caused a major power outage. In general, power outages are a frequent cause of data center trouble and other service interruptions. Even if safeguards are in place, there is always a chance that something will not work the way it is supposed to, like for example when the 365 Main backup generators wouldn’t start and left the likes of Technorati, Craigslist and LiveJournal offline for hours.

Image courtesy of TangoPango.

We decided to search in the news to find some of the various causes for power and network outages, and came back with some rather unusual results. Listed here are some of the ones we found from just the last week. It really seems like almost anything can happen, and does. Murphy’s Law in action?

Electrocuted raccoon (December 31)

What can we say? Poor little animal, poor 8,200 people without power.

A representative of the power company commented on the fried fur ball: “He probably was trying to find a warm spot as animals frequently do and it didn’t work out too well.”

No, it certainly didn’t…

Yet another truck driver (January 2)

Truck drivers everywhere seem to have their sights set on those power poles. This one took down four poles and a power transformer, blacking out an entire neighborhood.

Cable thieves (December 31)

Verizon customers were left without service when 500 feet of cable was dug up and stolen by copper thieves.

Random gunfire (January 1)

Fiber optics lines were knocked out by gunfire, causing Comcast subscribers in Memphis to lose cable service. A Comcast representative said that he believed that the shots may have been fired to celebrate the new year. Gun control, anyone…?

Dropped cell phone, kind of (December 27)

A man dropped his cell phone, tried to find it, and crashed into one of the main electrical feeder lines of a town in Montana. Don’t dial and drive…

And some less spectacular but just as effective reasons for outages

• An underground electrical fire (December 27)
• Swirling snow in an electrical meter box (December 26)
• A power surge caused a lightning arrestor (ironically there to prevent surges) to explode, which cut power to an entire downtown area. (December 25)
• Wind (January 1)
• And the plain mysterious (December 25)

Backup power and redundant internet connections to the rescue

It may not be too bad for regular consumers to be forced offline for a few hours, but for a company, or worse, a data center, it can be a major head ache.

To avoid this, make sure you have backup power (at least for critical equipment), and when it comes to internet access: if you run anything mission critical, make sure you have redundant internet connections.

Of course, if you run into something like the US Northeast Blackout of 2003, you may be in deep trouble no matter how prepared you are…

The outages we listed above just scrape the surface. A search in Google would show you much, much more.

Have you ever wondered how much money Google, Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Yahoo, Amazon and other tech giants have in the bank? What kind of assets do they have, how much spending money do they have? The vague answer is, “a lot.” But if you want to find out exactly how much, read on.

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Microsoft and open source, those are two things that traditionally don’t mix. Quite the opposite; the more hardcore members of the open source community tend to view Microsoft as just one step below Satan.

But while much of the open source community has little love for Microsoft, Microsoft is actually trying desperately to send some love back. The Redmond giant may have its own business reasons for doing so, of course, but that doesn’t change the fact that Microsoft is contributing to open source in more ways than most people are aware of.

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What do Android, Visio, Flash, Hotmail, Google Analytics and Powerpoint all have in common? Can you guess?

The answer is: None of them were created by the companies who now own them. They were acquisitions.

These products have continued to develop at their new homes, but the seed of innovation that sparked an actual, new product came from the outside. The key word here is innovation.

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We all know Google is huge and their wide range of services are bound to have a fair share of competitors, but you may be surprised just how wide-ranging Google considers its competition to be.

Here below we have included a quote from Google’s latest SEC filing with some very interesting information about what Google has to say about its competition.

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Big sites and services like Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter and many others rely heavily on open source software to run their operations. Happily, this isn’t a one-way street. They are also giving back to the open source community, not just by contributing to existing projects, but sometimes by open sourcing their own internal projects, giving back something completely new.

And what these popular sites can contribute is often quite valuable. Since they tend to be very large, they run big operations and have been forced to create solutions for scalability and performance problems that most other sites simply don’t have to deal with.

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