Rolling Blackouts in Texas May Cause Trouble for the Cloud
A cold snap in Texas may cause problems for the cloud. Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the operator of about 75% of the state's power grid, is ordering rolling blackouts to reduce power demand. This could cause disruptions for data centers based within ERCOT's region. According to The Associated Press this includes cities such as Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, San Antonio, Austin, Corpus Christi, and Abilene.
Several notable hosting companies, including Rackspace and Host Gator, are based in Texas. We haven't seen reports of outages from these or any other hosts, but WordPress warned users of its WordPress.com service that service may be interrupted.
Update: ERCOT has ended the rolling blackouts for today.
From WordPress's warning:
As some of you may have heard, starting this morning (CST), ERCOT, the operator of the power grid in Texas, has ordered utility companies to implement rolling blackouts across the state due to extreme weather conditions.Two of the three WordPress.com data centers are located in Texas - 1 in San Antonio and 1 in Dallas.
The Dallas facility has been operating on generator power since yesterday evening without issue. This morning, the generator in the San Antonio facility suffered a failure that has left us without a long-term backup power supply in that facility.
So far all the data centers are still up and running, but WordPress is preparing for the possibility that the servers in San Antonio will power off.
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