Rackspace, known for its 100% uptime guarantee, had problems last night when servers in their Dallas data center had to be taken offline for a couple of hours.

The reason for the outage was a car accident where a truck drove into a power transformer, which exploded. This caused a major power disruption.

When Rackspace’s backup power kicked in, two chillers failed to start. To prevent overheating, Rackspace took a number of servers offline, including servers for 37signals, GigaOM, WebmasterWorld and LaughingSquid.

Om Malik, editor of GigaOM, one of the affected sites, made the following observation:

Everything seems to be back to normal, but it leaves me with one simple observation: our Internet infrastructure despite all the talk is fragile as a fine porcelain cup on the roof of a car zipping across a pot-holed goat track. A single truck driver can take out sites like 37Signals out in a snap.

In other words: Murphy’s Law in action.

Read more about the outage:

TechCrunch, GigaOM, Data Center Knowledge, Valleywag, 37signals

Rackspace announcement

Webmasterworld uptime, November.