SoCal Fires Rage Out of Control: Cogent Shuts Down Datacenter
Jan 08, 2025 @ 11:52 am
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The Eaton wildfire in Southern California broke out about 36 hours ago and it’s racing across the region, threatening Pasadena, Altadena, and many surrounding communities.
As of early this morning, over 2,000 acres were affected, with the flames being driven by powerful winds.
For those unfamiliar with the geography, Los Angeles backs up to a series of mountain ranges to the East. The fire broke out where the Northeastern edge of LA touches the mountains.
Given the tech-heavy nature of the region, there is the potential for impacts to IT services. Cogent has already posted that they’ve had to do an emergency shutdown of their Pasadena datacenter.

Please stay safe everyone!
Dread Lord of LowEnd Content at LowEndBox
I'm raindog308, techno polymath and long-time LowEndTalk community Administrator. My technical interests include all things Unix, perl, python, golang, shell scripting, vintage operating systems such as MVS, and relational database systems such as Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.
I also enjoy using LEBs! I have an empire of little guys for VPNs, larger guys for apps, and big guys for databases and storage. When I'm not in front a screen I'm into German Shepherd dogs, quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop roleplaying games, and forest hiking.
I enjoy writing technical articles here on LowEndBox to help people get more out of their systems. You can find me on LowEndTalk @raindog308
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The wildfire’s impact on IT services is such an important point. With events like this becoming more frequent, do you think companies in tech-heavy regions should start building more resilient systems or decentralize their datacenters?
So far this year I had service issues due to two different hurricanes and now a fire. Not much a datacenter itself can do as they have to locate near the main internet connections. It’s up to us to build services resilient to this. Most that do what I do run it off one server. I run nine so if one has an issue within a minute I can edit a file and go around it.