Hurricane Sandy left the Huffington Post and Gawker crippled Tuesday morning after the storm downed the sites' main and back-up data servers.
HuffPost's typically colorful array of homepage images and large-font headlines was replaced with a WordPress-like page featuring a single stream of a posts and a status update in the top right corner.
"Our data center, our backup data center, and its three data providers all failed overnight due to Sandy, and the HuffPost and AOL tech teams are working closely with them to restore service," HuffPost spokesman Rhoades Alderson said in a statement. "In the meantime, we’re redirecting to a simple Blogsmith page with all of our breaking news — one power vertical! — until we’re back up."
Also read: Hurricane Sandy Takes Down Gawker, BuzzFeed, Huffington Post
Gawker's network of eight sites also crashed Monday evening and had yet to be restored on Tuesday, though the sites' URLs redirected readers to a simplified feed of stories similar to HuffPost's.
"Our New York Data Center is still offline thanks to Hurricane Sandy," Gawker posted on its main page. "We are working as quickly as possible to restore the full site, but in the interim you can view updates at http://updates.gawker.com."
It also began posting on its Tumblr site.
Earlier on Monday, BuzzFeed and the liberal political blog the Daily Kos went down, but were quickly restored. BuzzFeed flickered on and off throughout Monday evening, but remained live on Tuesday morning.