My hosting merchant had a “massive outage”:

Bluehost is down. The web hosting company started experiencing technical problems last night, following some botched maintenance. Thousands of sites are down with it and Twitter is ablaze with bloggers from all corners of the world moaning about the outage and threatening to dump Bluehost for good.

[….]

The direct cost of the outage is huge. With thousands of clients complaining about lost revenue, it is safe to assume that millions are lost by the hour. Even when the “issue”, which is a euphemism for “cock-up of epic proportions” is resolved, there will be hell to pay. The damage to Bluehost’s already shaken reputation will be a lot harder to fix.

The same datacentre also runs HostMonster, JustHost and FastDomain, affecting even more sites at even greater cost.

Endurance International, the owning company – ironically, it had the sense to host its site elsewhere – is giving 30 minute status updates; from my numerous sleepless nights working on such problems, I’m painfully aware of how disconnected from reality they probably are.

Capitalism being what it is, rivals have already set up is your website down with “BLUEHOSTDOWN” discount coupons, to entice website owners to switch.

The positive way to look at this is that, for an entire day, I haven’t been able to write anything that could get me sued.