Facebook users looking to kill a little time before the Fourth of July fireworks with a quick game of the popular Bejeweled Blitz game were greeted with an error message saying the site was down due to a fire at the data center that hosts the game’s servers.

“There was a major fire at Bejeweled Blitz’s server hosting facility last night. We would like to say that the heat of everybody’s gem swapping burned up the servers, but unfortunately in this case it was an actual fire,” the message from PopCap read on the Bejeweled Blitz’s Facebook page. The company said it was hoping to have things back up and running later tonight.

It doesn’t look like PopCap Games main site was affected by the outage, caused by a fire in an electrical vault at Seattle’s Fisher Plaza. But a number of other sites are suffering, including Bing.com’s travel site, Authorize.net and adhost.com, according to a list compiled by Kyle Mulka. And in a domino-effect progression, other sites had trouble, such as those that use Authorize.net for credit-card processing.

Adhost posted on its site: “Beginning at approximately 11:18 PM on July 2nd and continuing through the present time Fisher Plaza experienced a significant power event that required all power systems including street power, UPS, and Generator power to be completely shut down in Plaza East.”

Amazing that a major hosting provider would have single point of failure in the electrical system. A few hosting data centers I’ve visited featured redundant electrical feeds coming in at opposite ends of the building from different circuits. Having multiple locations for failover would help too, but that option is probably not fiscally feasible for smaller companies.

Some reports say power could be restored by 5pm Pacific Time. If not, go enjoy a BBQ or real fireworks instead of playing Bejeweled Blitz.

 
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