Manhattan-based news organisations like the Huffington Post, Gawker, Buzzfeed and others are offline because of Hurricane Sandy which battered New York and surrounding states.
The Huffington Post is running a low-tech crisis version of its website while its UK sister has taken to posting a handdrawn version of how its front page might have looked if its servers weren’t disrupted.
Buzzfeed is using Tumblr as a breaking news platform while its site remains static.
The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal unlocked their digital paywalls temporarily in order to provide non-subscribers with storm information.
Other sites affected by the outage due to storm included Gizmodo and all Gawker Media sites.
It is understood that many organisations’ sites were down due to a battery failure caused by flooding in a data centre.
The Huffington Post stated that HuffPost and AOL teams are working around the clock to repair damage to restore services after a failure of its backup generator systems, as well as connectivity failure at a backup data centre. The company got around the problem by redirecting visitors to a simple blogsmith site.
