PG&E Customers Lose Power in Downtown San Francisco (Update4)

By Greg Chang

July 24 (Bloomberg) -- San Francisco's downtown, including the financial district, suffered power interruptions that cut service to as many as 40,000 customers this afternoon and disabled some Web sites including Craigslist Inc.

Power fluctuations between 1:30 p.m. and 1:40 p.m. at a San Francisco power substation caused the outages, Pacific Gas & Electric spokesman Joe Molica said. Service was back to normal around 3:30 p.m., he said. Electricity to some buildings in the financial district cut on and off at least three times.

Some customers in San Mateo County, immediately south of San Francisco, also were without power, Molica said. Pacific Gas is the electric utility for most of Northern California.

Web sites including Craigslist and Yelp Inc. were disabled when data centers lost power. The disruption didn't affect operations at financial-services firms with major operations in the city, including Charles Schwab Corp., Barclays Global Investors and WR Hambrecht & Co., officials said.

``Around 2 p.m., the power went off and on intermittently,'' said Robert Raney, a portfolio manager with WR Hambrecht in San Francisco. The failure came after the close of regular U.S. stock trading and didn't affect the company, he said.

The San Francisco Chronicle reported that an explosion under a manhole on Mission Street downtown could have caused the outages. Molica said he couldn't confirm that.

The power failures set off fire alarms throughout the downtown area, forcing firefighters to respond. Commuter trains on the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit system were running normally, spokesman Jim Allison said.

Craigslist, Yelp

The problem may be ``affecting a lot of sites,'' Craigslist founder Craig Newmark said in an e-mail. Closely held Craigslist, which started as a local listing of classified ads, has grown to a Web site that spans the globe and gets more than 10 million users a month.

The site was offline for about three hours and was back online by about 5 p.m., spokeswoman Susan Best said in an e- mail.

The outage took down service at 365 Main Inc., a data center company that hosts sites including Craigslist and consumer-review site Yelp.com, which was unavailable for about two hours.

365 Main's building at its namesake street address was ``100 percent operational and running on back-up power'' by 4 p.m., spokeswoman Cynthia Harris said in an e-mail.

Google Inc., based in Mountain View, and Sunnyvale-based Yahoo! Inc. said they didn't experience any disruptions.

Financial District

The lack of power idled five electric-bus lines run by the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency for about 15 minutes. The historic cable-car system also temporarily went out of service, spokeswoman Maggie Lynch said in a phone interview.

Traders in the financial district said power supplies were normal.

``This building never went out and this is where the options exchange is,'' said Herb Kurlan, president of Vtrader Pro LLC, a San Francisco-based options and futures brokerage.

Other businesses, including Barclays Global Investors, switched to generators and suffered no disruptions. ``Business as usual,'' Barclays spokesman Lance Berg said in a phone interview.

Charles Schwab's headquarters in San Francisco regained power after a short interruption and was largely unaffected, spokesman Greg Gable said. There was no disruption in customer service, he said.

Early Close

The power failure caused some downtown offices to close for the day.

`It wasn't good for the computers,'' said Gina Ruggiero, who works in the area. ``We're leaving for the day.''

Norton's Vault, a financial-district tavern on Sacramento Street, enjoyed a mid-afternoon boost of customers who had similarly given up on work, said bartender Paul Simon.

The failures extended to some communities south of San Francisco, PG&E's Molica said. Between 30,000 and 50,000 customers were affected, he said.

Intel, the world's largest semiconductor maker, didn't experience any power failure, said Chuck Mulloy, a spokesman for the Santa Clara, California-based company. Santa Clara, the center of Silicon Valley, is 40 miles south of downtown San Francisco.

Pacific Gas is a unit of PG&E Corp.

To contact the reporter on this story: Greg Chang in San Francisco at gchang1@bloomberg.net

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Nigeria no get light at all, EVERY SINGLE DAY, and for EVERY corner-corner of the country, wey come be say any day when them mistake bring light for 30 minutes, you go come dey see people as them dey dance like person when drink bellefull, dey celebrate like say na Jesus just from inside aeroplane land for Nigeria to divide free cash give everybody.

Say light fit manage work for one blessed minute na [size=14pt]BIG NEWS [/size] for Nigeria, but for America most people there never even take eye see light outage ONCE like this since when them born them, so this single light off when happen for San Francisco, na something wey many San Francisco people go dey tell them pikin as wonderful story for the next 20 years.

@ topic
so what? my mother has not had light for one week!

To highlight the power poverty in Nigeria, consider that we have almost thrice the population of S. Africa, and we have struggled to keep our capacity at 3,000 MW.

South Africa is now planning to extend its capacity from the current 40,000MW!!!

Hmmmm