For the latest photos from Frankenstorm

election:

We’re still waiting for the full impact of Hurricane Sandy. But we’ve got at least a sense for what lies ahead in the next hours and days.

The National Weather Service has issued a series of warnings up and down the East Coast.

Below, we take a geographical look at the five most politically important areas in the path of the storm:

1. Philadelphia: This is where Democrats win elections in Pennsylvania, and it’s smack-dab in the middle of where the hurricane is supposed to make landfall. There is currently a flood warning in place for Philadelphia. The question is whether whatever happens over the next week hurts turnout in this vital area of the state. There is no early voting, so Democrats won’t be losing votes before Election Day, but they’ll need this area to come out strong on Nov. 6. If it doesn’t, that could give Republicans a better chance in a blue-leaning state (and a huge electoral vote prize).

The Post’s list of potentially affected regions also includes Boston, southwest Virginia, western and coastal North Carolina, as well as both northern and eastern Ohio. The storm is expected to leave tens of thousands, possibly even millions, of residents without power, and has already forced the cancellation of early voting in some parts of North Carolina. Could all this bad weather have an effect on the final results?

— Scott @ ShortFormBlog

(via thedailyfeed)

staff:

This morning, our primary datacenter effectively lost its connection to the Internet after our upstream provider (ISP) suffered a major outage caused by broken fiber lines.

It took nearly five hours before service was fully restored.

Our failover procedures, designed toimmediatelyrebalance traffic over our backup connections, failed to work as expected.

The major failing here was an oversight in how we had been performing ongoing testing of these backup links. Our checks missed an obscure but critical issue in these connections that prevented production traffic from being served properly.

We are already well into an effort to re-evaluate and adjust these testing procedures. We’ll be working through the weekend to make sure we’re not caught off-guard again.

Thank you for your patience today.

Excuses, excuses!

#Story Tuesday