A power outage in San Francisco today took out a whole bunch of sites. Craigslist, Live Journal, and many more sites took a crap when the “365 Main” data center went off-line.

Being a guy who works on data centers a bit, I find this a sad affirmation: I firmly believe that the Internet infrastructure is a house of cards just waiting to be knocked over.

All this talk about “redundant power supplies” and “tested backup plans” and “multiple data connections” is all a load of crap. You’d think these huge sites would maintain multiple data centers. Nope. You’d think that their “world class” center would be able to survive a relatively minor power outage. Nope. Embarassing, to say the least.

And it’s not limited to non-critical stuff like peoples’ blogs. Huge government infrastructures don’t maintain disaster recovery sites. These are entities with multi-million dollar budgets whose sole “plan” for DR/BR is to have employees drive to the office and pick up servers! It boggles the mind.

We all get so worked up about the Big Scary Terrorists and how they will Destroy Our Way Of Life. Trust me, it’s going to be some corporate goon who takes us out, not the Scary Terrorists.