#3 Serverbeach

During a storm a power feed failure lead to the ServerBeach datacentre to switch onto generator power.
Sadly at SB the generators didn’t cover the aircon units, just the servers.
Internal temperatures quickly soared to 60+ degrees in the DC, meaning everything had to be immediately shut down to save the building catching fire.

Time for a design rethink lads ?

#2 Rackspace

Rackspace gets a lot of business out of their ficticious claims of 100% uptime, yet regularly suffer outages (as do all hosts).
In one peculiar incident a truck drove into their transformers, causing everything to switch to generators (like Serverbeach)
The RS back-up generators unfortunately lacked the proper cooling needed to sustain the power creation and so were pulled offline, taking all the websites with them.

The fanatics on the live-chat tried to lie about it, but the news was already public knowledge

#1 DreamHost

No list of DC fvckups could be complete without the multiple outages at DH - and my personal fave of 2007 the datacentre is on fire.
Apparently after a power problem, DH switched to generators which then caught fire. This tends to mean power stops
Servers start to go down, email stops, websites vanish - and not just a few - a serious number of customers found themselves without their hosting in the fire-prone DC, leading to several hundred angry clients posting negative feedback on the DH-Blog

Does no-one in the US actually *TEST* generators ?