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Don't expect to hear from our blog buddies in the North East US, and when we do, boy are they gonna be pissed!

A power outage struck several cities in the eastern United States and Canada The Department of Homeland Security, ...A senior White House administration official , ...New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said there were no indications of terrorism. He said the outage was a "natural occurrence" that may be connected to a power grid malfunction near Niagara Falls. No outages were reported in Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Boston or Chicago. There were no power outages reported in the West Coast. Power company officials said there was no irregular activity in their power grid.

Subway, cell fones, air traffic all over . . . What a mess! UPDATE: all around the Great Lakes outages are reported. outage hit a little after 4:00 pm EDT [ 2000 GMT] Including: Ohio, Michigan, Ottowa and Toronto. Bloomberg said the result of a failure in the Niagara-Mohawk power grid and "the blackout could last into the evening"

"At this time, 4:50 pm EDT, the Internet is performing normally and major Web sites in the U.S. are also performing normally, although a few of the news Web sites are showing slightly longer download times," Keynote [Systems] spokesman Dan Berkowitz wrote in an e-mail.

The outage brought a halt to all flights out of both major airports in New York, as well as to flights leaving Newark, N.J.; Cleveland; Ottawa; and Toronto, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. All Northwest Airlines flights in Detroit were also grounded, an FAA representative said.

The FAA representative added that the North American air traffic control system was fully operational and that the travel halt was the result of an inability to power the security equipment used to screen passengers. The aviation agency said major delays are expected throughout the United States.

UPDATE: REUTERS ""The thinking is that a fire at a generating plant in Manhattan destabilized the grid, which cascaded up the grid and took a loop around the Great Lakes into Canada," UPDATE: CRN

Many clients still have not implemented back-up and recovery solutions. I walk into law firms and they haven't got a good back-up for six weeks or two months or three months, and there is no backup strategy or plan," he added. "It is amazing and it happens a lot." [said] Mark Stellini, CEO of Wilmington, Del., solution provider InfoSystems

UPDATE: NBC 6:43 pm EDT

...widespread power outage ...apparently left Rhode Island unaffected. But the outage did reach into Connecticut and western Massachusetts.

UPDATE:

CNN 2248 GMTBryan Lee, a spokesman for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, said based on preliminary information it appears that a "cascading blackout" has destabilized the power grid as far north as Canada and as far west as Detroit and Cleveland.

UPDATE: For the Visually Oriented: UPDATE:

CNN wins Understatement of the Day Awardliterally thousands of people [are] wandering the streets [in NYC]

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