Hurricane Sandy Knocks Out Gawker and Other News Sites The power outages that swept through the East Coast, including large swaths of Manhattan, in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, darkened millions of homes, as well as several major Web sites, including the hive of sites in the Gawker Media network, including Jezebel and Gizmodo. The Huffington Post and the technology blog Buzzfeed also went dark. The sites appeared to go off around 7 p.m., not long after Hurricane Sandy made its first contact with land. The sites seemed to share a common Internet service provider, Datagram. It is housed in the financial district in Lower Manhattan, which lost power on Monday evening. Although Datagram uses backup electricity generators in the event of a storm, its offices were flooded, knocking those machines out as well. Buzzfeed alerted its readers to the outages on its blog and said it was able to get portions of the site back online with the help of Akamai, a site that hosts its content at various servers distributed around the globe. The company also encouraged readers to follow the site's Tumblr and Twitter feeds for updates. Gawker went dark Monday night after its servers were knocked out by flooding. The company has been updating its readers using Twitter and is encouraging people to follow the site on Tumblr for news and updates. On a message posted to Twitter, the company promised it was "continuing to work on our servers and will be back online as soon as is possible. We miss you already. Stay dry.