Huffington Post, Gawker brought down by Superstorm Sandy

NEW YORK, NY - OCTOBER 29: Flooded cars, caused by Hurricane Sandy, are seen on October 29, 2012, in the Financial District of New York, United States. Hurricane Sandy, which threatens 50 million people in the eastern third of the U.S., is expected to bring days of rain, high winds and possibly heavy snow. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced the closure of all New York City will bus, subway and commuter rail service as of Sunday evening (Photo by Andrew Burton/Getty Images) / Andrew Burton

In addition to cutting power to millions and causing massive flooding in New York City, Superstorm Sandy also brought down several high-profile websites, including Huffington Post and Gawker. 

Those sites, along with Buzzfeed and Mediaite, apparently all went offline after 7 p.m. Monday.

Popular viral content website Buzzfeed issued a statement explaining that "Datagram, the ISP whose Manhattan servers host BuzzFeed, Huffington Post, Gawker, and other sites, has lost power." 

According to the statement, Buzzfeed received a text message from an official at Datagram, which read, "Basement flooded, fuel pump off line - we got people working on it now. 5 feet of water now."

Datagram's website also appears to be offline, and online address listings for Datagram place the company in Manhattan's financial district, which was heavily affected by flooding.

Buzzfeed was offline for much of Monday night, but, according to the statement, "Elements of Buzzfeed" were brought back online; Buzzfeed appears to be offline as of this writing.

The Huffington Post appears to have come back online at approximately 6:45 a.m. Tuesday, but with a much-reduced home page. A note on the page says that "We are working around the clock to get the site back to normal," and that "The news team...is still monitoring everything and will be updating this page with the latest on the storm. We will also update our social media accounts."

All Gawker Media websites, including Gizmodo and Deadspin, are down as of this writing. Gawker posted to Twitter at around 10 p.m. Monday, saying "We're continuing to work on our servers and will be back online as soon as is possible. We miss you already. Stay dry."

Media blog Mediaite remains down as of this writing.

[madmatthew]

Predicting a boom in disaster backup services now. God only knows how much revenue all these sites lost.