HuffPost CTO On How Hurricane Sandy Took Down The Huffington Post (VIDEO)

WATCH: HuffPost CTO On How Hurricane Sandy Took Down The Huffington Post

How did Hurricane Sandy manage to knock The Huffington Post offline on Monday evening?

HuffPost chief technology officer John Pavley joined HuffPostLive on Tuesday to explain what caused the outage, which lasted through Tuesday morning.

As Pavley explains, issues started around 7PM on Monday when one of the site's New York City data centers, located near Battery Park, was flooded by the storm, which knocked parts of the site offline. HuffPost's tech team scrambled to use the site's backup data center in Newark, though that also ran into its own problems as the evening progressed. Pavley notes that there are three separate circuits that transfer data to and from the data center, which are designed to be redundant. All three went dead for as yet undetermined reasons.

Between Monday night and Tuesday morning, HuffPost was accessible via a temporary site -- status.huffingtonpost.com -- and writers and editors relied on Tumblr, Facebook and Twitter to post stories and information during the storm.

"Most of the technology team we have in New York was awake all night long," Pavley said. "We did take a couple of naps because Arianna says we have to get sleep."

He added, "It was very dramatic and scary because you're afraid for your family loved ones and also we're dedicated to keeping The Huffington Post site up."

HuffPost is currently relying on its Newark data center, while the New York City facility is still under repair.
Learn more about how Hurricane Sandy took down HuffPost in the video above, from HuffPostLive.

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