Technology, Storm | featured news

With only sporadic access to text messaging and the Web, many in Hurricane Sandy's no-power zone quickly cobbled together systems for passing along information and arranging when and where to meet.

Electrons work for free, except, of course in major storms -- as several prominent websites discovered... Lost sites beginning [Monday] night included the Huffington Post, Gawker and the blog Mediaite. Huffington Post was back by Tuesday morning, but the site was a bit skimpier. According to a statement posted on a website of the more traditional kind, CBS News, the problem seemed to be flooding.

Storm-related outages at an Amazon data center in Ashburn prompted some congressional officials on Monday to question whether the federal government is moving too swiftly to put important data on private-sector cloud computing servers.