I’ve been meaning to go geocaching for a while now and just today I had the chance. When I went to go to the website, however, I couldn’t get there. Sometimes this happens, so I tried a proxy. And then another. Nothing in both cases. I did some digging and found that their DNS servers weren’t even up.
After a little more digging, I found that apparently their datacenter is located in Fisher Plaza in Seattle. A fire knocked out power to the entire building which shut down several major sites, the most prominent of which is Bing Travel. There seems to be no telling when they’ll get power back. In the meantime, for geocaching.com and probably many of the other sites involved, a holiday weekend is a terrible time to go down.
Kyle Mulka’s Blog has a list of sites that are reported offline due to the fire and updates when they’re back up.
Update 7-4 10:00 – Geocaching.com is back online now, although it was a bit slow to load for me.