DreamHost down due to LA Power Outage

DreamHost’s network and all of our servers were taken down for about 4 hours this afternoon due to a major power outage in the Los Angeles area. The building housing our data center has redundant battery and diesel generator backed up power, but it didn’t work as expected. When we moved into this data center space we were reassured several times that the power supplied by the building was fault tolerant and would stay up even in a major power outage. We haven’t yet heard their side of things but I’m sure it will be interesting.