Live Journal/ Craigslist/ Technorati Offline; Valleywag Blames "drunk employee"; Rest of World Blames "Power Outage"

Update: Valleywag corrects the record. The write can be seen wearing the dunce hat.

Valleywag is the freshest, and most entertaining technology blog out there. They are nothing less than the tech industries' premier tabloid (albeit much funnier than a typical tabloid).

Today, however, they crossed my line[1]; thus, today, my finger wags violently in Vallegwag's general direction.

***

It would be a great story, if it weren't for facts....

To state the obvious, 365 main, the webhost of Yelp, Craigslist, Technorati, Six Apart, and Live Journal (etc... etc...) build their business off of providing ultra-reliable, high quality hosting.

One of valleywag's "insider sources" claimed that the outage was the result of a drunk and disgruntled employee pulling a plug.

Someone came in shitfaced drunk, got angry, went berserk, and fucked up a lot of stuff. There's an outage on 40 or so racks at minimum.

If this were true, it would be a double-digit blow to the revenue of a company who's main "value-proposition" was "serious hosting, for serious business...". If it was indeed true, I'd laude Valleywag for reporting it.

The problem with the "drunken employee" theory is that just about everyone in San Francisco happeneed to report power outages during that period [see comments section at valleywag, including one customer, Dave Sifry at techorati saying, "we're having blackouts..."] (and the really sad part, is that I live in Austin, TX, and was able to figure that out...)

So, whatever, Valleywag makes a mistake, and corrects the record... However, that hasn't happened: they continue to maintain hours after the the widespread reports of power outages in SF, that it was a drunk employee.

I'm not going to ramble about "bloggers as journalists, and their responsibilites...". Rather, I'm going to merely remind Valleywag that what they are doing is technically libel, and that they could easily lose the case against the plantiff if they don't correct the record in a swift, and "hard to miss" manner.

Notes:

1. I actually have quite a thick line.