btw I’m near Seattle, in case you’re wondering why I’m blathering about this …
update3: KOMO is back via cable and it’s a very barebones newscast.
They have laptops for Paul Deanno and the traffic girl placed on top of covered up recycling bins. There are no graphics or ad breaks. Paul is delivering his forecast without any visuals at all. And the traffic girl used her laptop and a website to show traffic conditions. The anchors have no prompters, obviously, so they are all ad libing their way trough this.
And it appears that KOMO was knocked out around 11:15pm PST last night! So they have been out for nearly 7 hours.
update2: Interesting to watch this big fail unfold. The traffic reporter tweeted that a fire set off the sprinkler system, which fried the generators and left the station and everyone else in the building without power! So the KOMO staff had to scurry up and improvise really fast. Funny, or I guess not so funny, the data center is supposed to be “Class A” engineered to avoid any single point of failure. Guess that settles the question does it fail. Apparently it does. We almost moved SFLTV there in May when all the database problems were taking the site offline.
Update: must be a massive outage. There is no signal coming via cable. The HD channel is out and analog 4 shows still image from an infomercial. If they send content out via fiber optic the cable and sat operators aren’t getting anything at the moment that would explain it. Right now probably only viewers with an over-the-air antenna can see the broadcast.
One of the ABC affiliates here in Seattle is having some big issues. KOMO which is based at Fisher Plaza in Seattle was knocked off the air when a fire cause the power to go out.
Paul Deanno tweeted on arrival to work that they have a makeshift set at Kerry Park because all of Fisher Plaza is without power.
The building is home to a teleport, Fisher Pathways, which offers satellite communications services, at least one data center rated “Class A”. And some of the tenants are Fortune 500 companies.
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8 Responses to Fisher Communications and KOMO Suffer Huge Outage
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Annnnnd….this has to do with South Florida how?
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Authorize.net is housed in that building. They were shut down, not allowing “tens of thousands” of customers to be able to process credit cards, including this South Florida company. Multiplied many times over, that does affect South Florida.
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Sounds like you need to start the SEATV blog…
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sounds right … im just blogging because well … because I can
2 hours of nothing but adlibing, no prompters or graphics. Printed news from the internet and traffic and weather from a laptop.
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Regardless of the location, that must have been awful for them. Searched Google News to see if any mainstream media outlets had anything yet (because, it seems like something that would at least have some national presence)…nothing yet. Maybe later.
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Wait, so does that mean that KOMO Newsradio (1000 KOMO-AM & 97.7 KOMO-FM), AM 570 KVI and Star 101.5 (KPLZ-FM) also lost power too?
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everyone based out of Fisher Plaza was out, and still is as of 8pm with power coming on soon.
Komo 1000 was at their translator site broadcasting over AM only. and KATU Portland ran everything for KOMO-TV.
The data center on site hosted seventhgeneration.com as well as Authorize.net, one of the biggest credit card processors
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Analog should be off anyway. Why waste power on a now defunct system?
Guess an earthquake was not a big concern to the engineering staff, if a sprinkler flood exposed their back generator systems.
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