Gawker Media sites — along with the Huffington Post and BuzzFeed — went down Monday as Hurricane Sandy flooded New York City.
The network of eight Gawker blogs went offline when servers in both its main data center and its backup crashed amid the hurricane. The Huffington Post and BuzzFeed, which also went down, were quickly restored.
"Gizmodo and the Gawker network is down… victim of hurricane #Sandy," Gizmodo tweeted just after 4 p.m. EDT. "We will keep updating here."
About 20 minutes later, the tech site — which was providing updates about the storm throughout the day — said its generators were powering up, but by 9 p.m. EDT, the site was still down.
"We'll be back soon! There was a data center battery failure after the power went down in Lower Manhattan," it tweeted. "Generators powering up."
Never missing a chance for snark, Gawker tweeted that its servers were downed by the crane that collapsed on 57th Street earlier that day.
"Gawker is temporarily down because the 57th Street Crane just flooded our servers with sea foam, or something," it tweeted. "Back with you shortly."
Jalopnik, the Gawker site focused on automotive news, joked that traffic to the site was being disrupted by the release of a new racing game.
"Jalopnik is down temporarily as someone decided to use the servers to see if we can run traffic in 'Forza Horizon' multiplayer," the site wrote on its Facebook. "(We kid: data center went down, backup went down)."
